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TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 




THE ROOF GARDEN AND POMPEIAN FOUNTAIN AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS. 
(From the Painting by Yoshio Markino.) 



TWENTY YEARS 
OF MY LIFE 



DOUGLAS SLADEN 



AUTHOR OF "VVHOS WHo" 



WITH FOUR COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS AND TWELVE PORTRAITS 



BY 



YOSHIO MARKING 




NEW YORK 

EPDUTTON &• COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



£^ 



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PEisTEn IN Great Bhitain bv 
EicHAKD Clay & Sons, Limited, 

BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFOUD ST., S.E., 
AND BUNGAY SUFFOLK. 






affectionateijY dedicated 

TO 

JEROME K. JEROME 

ONE OF THE EABLIEST AND DEAREST OF MY 
LITERAEY FRIENDS 



INTRODUCTION 

When I wrote Who's Who, sixteen or seventeen years ago, 
I used to receive shoals of funny letters from people who 
wanted, or did not want, to be included, and now, when I 
have not edited the book for more than a dozen years, I still 
receive letters of criticism on the way in which I conduct it, 
and usually consign them to limbo. A few months ago, 
however, I received the subjoined letter, which is so out of 
the ordinary that I quote it to show what illustrious corre- 
spondents I have. I must not attach the author's name, 
though every grown-up man in the civilised world would be 
interested to know it. 

" Dear Sir, 

" Kindly cease to omit my name from your ever- 
increasing list of persons as annually placed before the 
public for sale at any price it is worth. Just put me down 
in place of Victoria Alice, who is an American pure and 
simple, while I am left out in the cold. I am the daughter of 

King Edward VII i I am the legal spouse of 

Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, being legally married to him 
in 1890, Aug. 14, a ratification of which occurrence was held 
by me in hallway of British Embassy, Paris, France, 1900, 
same date. Just give me a notice, will you, instead of harping 
on the sisterhood of King George V, who form among them- 
selves a similar affair to that held by female contingent of 
Synagogue, doing more damage in the community, and 
eventually in the world, than any one set of people anywhere, 
with method so secret that even Rabbi is unable to uncover 
the original design known as main point in England. 

" Sincerely, 

" Etc., etc. 

" October 23, 1913." 

If I could tell all I know about the interesting people I 
have met, the book would read like my own Who's Who 
re-written by Walter Emanuel for publication in Punch. As 
it is, the book contains a great deal of information about 

^ 'riiis portion of the letter could not be printed. 



viii INTRODUCTION 

celebrities which could never appear in Who''s Who, and all 
the best anecdotes which I remember about my friends, 
except those which would turn my friends into enemies, and 
even some of those I mean to give in this preface, minus the 
names, to prevent their being lost to posterity. 

The twenty years of my life which I here present to readers 
are the twenty years which I spent at 32, Addison Mansions, 
Kensington, during which I was in constant intercourse with 
most of the best -known writers of the generation. The book 
is therefore largely taken up with personal reminiscences and 
impressions of them— indeed, not a few of them, such as 
Conan Doyle, J. K. Jerome, I. Zangwill, H. A. Vachell, Charles 
Garvice, Eden Phillpotts, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Mrs. 
Croker, Mrs. Perrin, Madame Albanesi, Compton Mackenzie, 
and Jeffery Farnol's mentor, wrote specially for this book 
an account of the circumstances which led to their being 
authors. For it must be remembered that the majority of 
authors start life in some other profession, and drift into 
authorship as they discover their aptitude for it. Conan 
Doyle was a doctor, in busy practice when he wrote The 
White Company ; Jerome was a lawyer's clerk when he 
wrote Three Men in a Boat ; both Hardy and Hall Caine began 
as architects ; Zangwill was a teacher, and W. W. Jacobs was 
a clerk in the General Post Office. 

An index of the authors of whom personal reminiscences 
are told in this book will be found at the end. 

Its earlier chapters deal with my life prior to our going to 
Addison Mansions, giving details of my parentage and bring- 
ing-up, of the seven years I spent in Australia and the United 
States, and my long visits to Canada and Japan. From that 
point forward, except for the four chapters which deal with 
the writing of my books, the present volume is occupied 
chiefly with London literary society from 1891 to 1911. 

It was in the 'nineties that the late Sir Walter Besant's 
efforts to bring authors together by the creation of the 
Authors' Club, and their trade union, the Authors' Society, 
bore fruit. English writers, who had hitherto been the 
reverse of gregarious, began to meet each other very often 
at receptions and clubs. 

In those days one made new friends among well-known 
authors, artists, and theatrical people every day, at places 
like the Authors', Arts, Vagabonds, Savage, Hogarth and 
Argonauts' Clubs, the Idler teas, and women's teas at the 
Pioneer Club, the Writers' Club, and the Women Journalists', 
and various receptions in Bohemia. It was almost an offence 



INTRODUCTION ix 

to spend an entire afternoon, or an entire evening, in any other 
way, and though it made inroads on one's time for work, and 
time for exercise, it gave one an intimacy, which has lasted, 
with men and women who have since risen to the head of 
their professions. That intimacy is reflected in these pages, 
which show a good deal of the personal side of the literary 
movement of the 'nineties and the literary club life of the 
period. 

I have endeavoured in this book to interest my readers in 
two ways— by telling them the circumstances in my bringing- 
up, and my subsequent life, which made me a busy man of 
letters instead of a lawyer, and by giving them my reminis- 
cences of friends who have won the affection of the public 
in literature, in art, and on the stage. 

As I feel that a great many of my readers will be much 
more interested in my reminiscences than in my life, I advise 
them to begin at Chapter VI — or, better still, Chapter VIII — 
from which point forward, with the exceptions of Chapters 
XVI-XIX, the book is taken up more with the friends I have 
had the good fortune to know than with myself. 

Before concluding, I will give three or four stories too 
personal to have names attached to them. 

I once heard a Bishop, who in those days was a smug and 
an Oxford Don, remark to a circle of delighted undergraduates, 
" My brother Edward thinks I'm an awful fool." As his 
brother Edward was Captain of the Eton Eleven, and 
amateur champion of something or other, there is no doubt 
that his brother Edward did think him an awful fool. 

I once heard an author, at the very moment that Robert 
Louis Stevenson, as we had learnt by telegram that afternoon, 
was lying in state under the sky at Samoa, awaiting burial, 
say, replying to the toast of his health at a public dinner, 
that he had been led to write his most popular book by the 
perusal of Stevenson's Treasure Island. 

" I said to myself," he naively remarked, "that if I could 
not write a better book than that in six weeks, I would shoot 
myself." 

The same man, when another of his books had been drama- 
tised, and he was called before the curtain on the first night 
of its production, informed the audience that it was a very 
good play, and that it would be a great success when it was 
decently acted. So complacent was he about it that the 
friend who tried to pull him back behind the curtain by 
the tails of his dress-coat failed until he had split the coat 
up to the collar. 



X INTRODUCTION 

This man has the very best instincts, but he has a genius 
for poking his finger into people's eyes. 

I once knew the brother of a Bishop, who left the Church 
of England, and went to America to be a Unitarian clergy- 
man, because he wished to marry a pretty American heiress, 
and he had a wife already in England. By and by his new 
sect heard of it, and expelled him with conscious or uncon- 
scious humour for " conduct incompatible with membership 
in the Unitarian Church." He hired a hall from the piano 
company opposite, and nearly the whole congregation moved 
across the street with him. Except in the matter of mono- 
gamy, he was a most Christian man, and his congregation 
had the highest respect and affection for him and his bigamous 
wife ; and this in spite of the fact that he constantly alluded 
to the Trinity as he warmed to his subject in sermons for the 
edification of Unitarians. If he noticed it, he corrected him- 
self and said Triad. He was one of the most delightful men 
I ever met, and his influence on his congregation was of the 
very best. 

In the days when I saw so much of actors at our own flat, 
and went every Sunday night to the O.P., I was once asked 
to arbitrate in a dispute between an actor-manager and the 
critic of a great daily, who had exchanged " words " in the 
theatre. The critic either dreaded the expense of a lawsuit, 
or had no desire to make money if he could obtain the amende 
honorable. I heard all they had to say, and then I turned 
round and said to the great actor, " Did you say that about 

Mr. ? " and he replied with an Irishism which I got 

accepted as an apology: " I really couldn't say; I'm such a 
liar that I never know what I have said and what I haven't 
said." 

These are stories to which I could not append the names, 
but the reader will find as good and better if he turns up the 
names of S. H. Jeyes, Oscar Wilde and Phil May in the index. 



CHAP. 
I 

II 

III 

IV 

V 

VI 
VII 
VIII 

IX 

X 

XI 

XII 

XIII 
XIV 
XV 
XVI 
XVII 
XVIII 
XIX 



CONTENTS 

MY LIFE (1856-1886) .... 
MY LIFE (1886-1888) .... 

I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 

I GO TO JAPAN 

BACK TO CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES 

LITERARY AT-HOMES AND LITERARY CLUBS 

WE START OUR LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 

OUR AT-HOMES : YOUNG AUTHORS WHO ARE NOW GREAT 
AUTHORS 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES ... 

THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES . . . . , 

LADY AUTHORS AT ADDISON MANSIONS . . . , 

LITERARY CLUBS : MY CONNECTION WITH THE AUTHORS 
CLUB 



LITERARY CLUBS : THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 

LITERARY CLUBS : THE SAVAGE CLUB . 

MY CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 

THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART I . 

THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART II . 

THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART III 

HOW I WROTE " who's WHO " . . . , 



PAOR 
1 

20 
26 
35 
46 

52 
57 

73 

82 

103 

119 

146 
162 
183 
188 
204 
216 
223 
233 



xii CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

XX AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 240 

XXI MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART I 251 

XXII MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART II 279 

XXIII MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART III 288 

XXIV OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS 300 

XXV FRIENDS WHO NEVER CAME TO ADDISON MANSIONS . 307 

XXVI MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 312 

XXVII MY ACTOR FRIENDS . 328 

XXVIII MY ARTIST FRIENDS 346 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



COLOURED PICTURES BY YOSHIO MARKING 

To face page 
THE ROOF GARDEN OF 32 ADDISON MANSIONS . FrOiltispiece 



THE MOORISH ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS. 



72 



THE DINING ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS IN WHICH MOST 

OF MY BOOKS WERE WRITTEN 204 



THE JAPANESE ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS 



306 



PORTRAITS BY YOSHIO MARKINO 

DOUGLAS SLADEN 

ISRAEL ZANGWILL 

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 

JEROME K. JEROME . 

MISS BRADDON . 

CHARLES GARVICE 

G. B. BURGIN . 

SIDNEY LOW 

HALL CAINE 

W. B. MAXWELL 

SIR GILBERT PARKER 

SIR HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE 



26 
50 

74 
98 
124 
150 
174 
191 
224 
279 
324 
344 



INDEX OF REMINISCENCES 

At the end of the book will be found an index of the 
well-known people about whom personal reminiscences or 
new facts are told — such as Prince Alamayu of Abyssinia, 
Mnie. Albanesi, Sir Edwin Arnold, Lena Ashwell, Sarah 
Bernhardt, Sir Walter Besant, Rolf Boldrewood, Hall 
Caine, Dion Clayton Calthrop, Mrs. Clifford, Bishop 
Creighton, Mrs. Croker, Sir A. Conan Doyle, Lord 
Dundonald, Sir J. Forbes-Robertson, Charles Garvice, 
Bishop Gore, Sarah Grand, George Grossmith, Thomas 
Hardy, Bret Harte, W. E. Henley, Robert Hichens, 
John Oliver Hobbes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Anthony 
Hope, J. K. Jerome, S. H. Jeyes, C. Kernahan, A. H. Savage 
Landor, Maarten Maartens, Compton MacKenzie, Yoshio 
Markino, "Bob" Martin, George Meredith, Frankfort 
Moore, Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking, F. W. H. Myers, 
Nansen, Cardinal Newman, Mrs. Perrin, Eden Phillpotts, 
Rt. Hon. Sir Geo. Reid, Whitelaw Reid, Lord Roberts, 
the late Lord Salisbury, F. Hopkinson Smith, Father 
Stanton, Mrs. Flora Annie Steel, August Strindberg, 
Mark Twain, H. A. Vachell, J. M. Whistler, Percy White, 
Oscar Wilde, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Lord 
Willoughby de Broke, Margaret Woods, Sir Charles 
Wyndham and Israel Zangwill. 

D. S. 



TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

CHAPTER I 

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 

I WAS born on February 5, 1856, in the town-house of 
my maternal grandfather. My father, a soHcitor by pro- 
fession, who died in the last days of 1910, at the age of 
eighty-six, was almost the youngest of the sixteen children 
of my paternal grandparents, John Baker Sladen, D.L., 
J. P., of Ripple Court, near Dover, and Etheldred St. Barbe. 
The name St. Barbe has been freely bestowed on their 
descendants because the first St. Barbe in this country has 
the honour of appearing on the Roll of Battle Abbey. 

My maternal grandparents were John Wheelton and Mary 
Wynfield. Mr. Wheelton (I was never able to discover any 
other person named Wheelton, till I found, among the 
survivors of the loss of the Titanic, a steward called Wheelton ; 
truly the name has narrowly escaped extinction), from whom 
I get my third Christian name, was in business as a shipper 
on the site of the General Post Office, and was Master of the 
Cordwainers' Company. He was Sheriff of London in the 
year of Queen Victoria's marriage. Though he lived at 
Meopham near Tonbridge, he came from Manchester, and 
I am, therefore, a Lancashire man on one side of the house. 
But oddly enough I have never been to Manchester. 

Charles Dickens, when he first became a writer, was a 
frequent guest at his hospitable table, and has immortalised 
him in one of his books. He was in a way immortalised by 
taking a leading part in one of the most famous law cases in 
our history, Stockdale versus Hansard. As Sheriff he had 
to levy an execution on Hansard, the printer to the House 
of Commons, who had published in the reports of the debates 



2 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

a libel on Mr. Stockdale. The House declared it a breach of 
privilege, and sentenced the Sheriff to be imprisoned in the 
Speaker's house, from which he was shortly afterwards 
released on the plea of ill-health. But with the City of 
London as well as the Law Courts against them, the members 
of the House of Commons determined to avoid future collisions 
by bringing in a bill to make the reports of the proceedings 
of Parliament privileged and this duly became law. 

I have in my possession an enormous silver epergne, 
supported by allegorical figures of Justice and others, which 
the City of London presented to my grandfather in honour 
of this occasion, with a few survivors of a set of leather fire- 
buckets, embellished with the City arms, which now do 
duty as waste-paper baskets. 

I was baptised in Trinity Church, Paddington, and shortly 
afterwards my parents went to live at 22, Westbourne Park 
Terrace, Paddington, continuing there till 1862. 

It was in this year that my last sister, Mrs. Young, was 
born, just before we changed houses. My eldest sister, who 
inarried the late Rev. Frederick Robert Ellis, only son of 
Robert Ridge Ellis, of the Court Lodge, Yalding, Kent, and 
for many years Rector of Much Wenlock, was born in 1850. 
My second sister, who married Robert Arundel Watkins, 
eldest surviving son of the Rev. Bernard Watkins, of Treeton, 
and afterwards of Lawkland Hall, Yorkshire, was born in 
1851 ; and my brother, the Rev. St. Barbe Sydenham Sladen, 
who holds one of the City livings, St. Margaret Patten, was 
born in 1858. 

My father, having become better off by the death of my 
two grandfathers in 1860 and 1861, bought a ninety-six 
years' lease of Phillimore Lodge, Campden Hill, which I 
sold in 1911. 

I believe that I never left London till I was four years 
old, when we all went to stay with my uncle, the Rev. William 
Springett, who still survives, at Dunkirk Vicarage, near 
Canterbury. While we were there I first saw and dipped 
my hands in the sea, which I was destined to traverse so 
often, at a place called Seasalter, to which we drove from 
Dunkirk. 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 3 

From 1862 to 1868, when my mother died, we children 
generally spent the summer at Brighton, from which my 
father went away to a moor in Yorkshire for the grouse- 
shooting. As a child, I soon grew tired of Brighton, which 
seemed so like a seaside suburb of London. I used to think 
that the sea itself, which had no proper ships on it, was like 
a very large canal. I longed for real sea, like we had seen 
at Deal, where we went to stay in my grandmother Sladen's 
dower-house, shortly after our visit to Dunkirk. There we 
had seen a full-rigged ship driven on to the beach in front of 
our house in a gale, and had seen the lifeboat and the Deal 
luggers putting out to wrecks on the Goodwin Sands, and 
had seen the largest ships of the day in the Downs. I 
loved the woods we had rambled in, between Dunkirk and 
Canterbury, even better still. I never found the ordinary 
seaside place tolerable till I became enamoured of golf. 
Without golf these places are marine deserts. 

I never tasted the real delights of the country till we 
went in the later 'sixties to a farmhouse on the edge of the 
Duke of Rutland's moors above Baslow, in Derbyshire. 
With that holiday I was simply enchanted. For rocks meant 
fairyland, as they still do, to me. And there I had, besides 
rocks, like the Cakes of Bread, the clear, trout-haunted 
mountain-river Derwent, and romantic mediaeval architecture 
like Haddon Hall. Besides, we were allowed to run wild 
on the farm, to sail about the shallow pond in a cattle-trough, 
to help to make Wensleydale cheeses (this part of Derbyshire 
arrogates the right to use the name), and to hack the garden 
about as much as we liked. It was there that I had my first 
real games of Red Indians and Robinson Crusoe, and there 
that I had the seeds of my passion for architecture implanted 
in me. 

We drove about a great deal — to the Peak, with its caverns 
and its queer villages, to the glorious Derbyshire Dales, and 
to great houses like Chatsworth. Certainly Baslow was my 
fairy-godmother in authorship, and my literary aspirations 
were cradled in Derbyshire. My father gave me a good 
schooling in the beauties of England. We were always taken 
to see every place of any interest for its scenery, its buildings, 



4 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

or its history, which could be reached in a day by a pair of 
horses from the house, where we were spending our summer 
hoHdays. He had the same iiair for guide-books as I have, 
and taught me how to use them intelligently. 

Up till 1864 I was taught by governesses with my elder 
sisters. There were three of them, Miss Morrison, Miss Bray, 
and Miss Rose Sara Paley, an American Southerner, whose 
parents had been ruined by the Civil War. She was a very 
charming and intelligent woman, and taught my eldest sister 
to compose in prose and verse. For a long time this sister 
was the author of our home circle. I was too young to try 
composition in those days, but seeing my eldest sister do it 
familiarised me with the idea of it. I also had a music 
mistress, because it was hoped that playing the piano would 
restore my left hand to its proper shape, after the extra- 
ordinary accident which I had when I was only two years 
old. She was Miss Rosa Brinsmead, a daughter of the John 
Brinsmead who founded the famous piano-making firm. The 
point which I remember best about her was that she had 
fair ringlets like Princess (now Queen) Alexandra, who had 
just come over from Denmark and won all hearts. 

The accident happened by my falling into the fireplace, 
when my nurse left me for a minute. To raise myself up 
I caught hold of the bar of the grate with my left hand, and 
scorched the inside out. It is still shrivelled, though fifty- 
five years have passed since that awful day for my mother, 
when she found her only son, as she thought, crippled for 
life. 

But though it chapped terribly every winter, and would 
not open properly for the next three or four years, I soon 
got back the use of my hand, and no one now suspects it of 
being the least disfigured till I hold it open to show them. 
The back was uninjured, and it looks a very nice hand by 
X-rays, when only the bones are visible. 

The doctor recommended that, being a child of a very 
active brain (I asked quite awkward questions about the 
birth of my brother shortly afterwards), I should be taught 
to read while I was kept in bed, as the only means of keeping 
my hand out of danger, and I was given a box of letters which 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 5 

I always arranged upon the splint of my wounded hand. 
By the time that it was well I could read, and on my fifth 
birthday I was given the leather-bound Prayer-book which 
I had been promised whenever I could read every word 
in it. I have the Prayer-book still, half a century later. 

Poor Miss Brinsmead had a hopeless task, for though I 
could learn to read so easily, I never could learn to play on 
the piano with both hands at the same time, except in the 
very baldest melodies, like " God Save the Queen," and the 
" Sultan's Polka." These I did achieve. 

In 1864 I was sent to a dame's school in Kensington 
Square, kept by the Misses Newman, from which I was 
shortly afterwards transferred to another kept by Miss 
Daymond, an excellent teacher, where I had Johnny and 
Everett Millais, and sons of other great artists, for my 
schoolfellows. 

In 1866, though it nearly broke my mother's heart, I 
was sent to my first boarding-school. Temple Grove, East 
Sheen — in the old house where Dorothy Temple had lived, 
and Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, the greatest 
of that illustrious race, was born — the school, moreover, 
which had numbered Benjamin Disraeli among its pupils. 
How many people are there who know that Dizzy was 
schooled in the house in which Palmerston was born — those 
two great apostles of British prestige? 

Here I stayed for three years before I won the first junior 
scholarship at Cheltenham College, and here, from my 
house-master, I had a fresh and wonderful department of 
knowledge opened to me, for he used to take me natural- 
ising (both by day and by night, when the other boys were 
in bed) on Sheen Common, then wild enough to have snakes 
and glow-worms and lizards, as well as newts and leeches, 
and rich in insect prizes. I won this favour because he 
accidentally discovered that I knew " Mangnall's Ques- 
tions " and " Common Subjects " by heart. But though he 
was Divinity Master, he never discovered that I knew my 
Bible quite as well. 

He also taught me to lie. I had never told a lie till I 
went to Temple Grove. But as he prided himself on his 



6 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

acuteness, he was constitutionally unable to believe the 
truth. It was too obvious for him. When I found that he 
invariably thought I was lying while I still obeyed my 
mother's teaching, and was too afraid of God to tell a lie, 
I suddenly made up my mind that I would humour him, 
and tell whatever lie was necessary to this transparent 
Sherlock Holmes. After this he always believed me, unless 
I accidentally forgot and told him the truth. And I liked 
him so much that I wished him to believe me. 

He did not injure my character as much as he might have 
done, because I was born with a loathing for insincerity. 
The difficulty came when he and Waterfield, the head 
master, questioned me about the same thing, for Waterfield 
mesmerised one into telling the truth, and he tempted one 
to tell a lie. It reminds me now of Titian's " Sacred and 
Profane Love." 

At Temple Grove I acquired my taste for games and taste 
for natural history. 

In 1868, my mother, to whom I was passionately attached, 
died. I used to dream that she was alive for months after- 
wards. And the great theosophist to whom I mentioned this 
sees in it an astral communication. To divert my thoughts 
from this, the greatest grief I had ever had, I was sent to 
stay with my cousin, Colonel Joseph Sladen, who had already 
succeeded to Ripple Court, and was then a Gunner Captain, 
stationed at Sheerness. He belonged to the Royal Yacht 
Squadron, and had a schooner yacht in which we used to 
go away for cruises up the Channel. I was a little boy of 
twelve, and his two eldest sons, Arthur Sladen, now H.R.H. 
the Duke of Connaught's Private Secretary in Canada, and 
Sampson Sladen, now the Chief of the London Fire Brigade, 
were hardly more than babies, but I enjoyed it very much, 
because I was interested in the yachting and in the firing 
of the hundred-pounder Armstrongs, which were the monster 
guns of those days. We went in my cousin's yacht to see the 
new ironclad fleets of Great Britain and France, and we went 
over the Black Prince and the Minotaur, the crack ships of 
the time. 

A year after that, exactly on the first anniversary of my 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 7 

mother's death, I went to Cheltenham College, where I had 
taken a scholarship. I was at Cheltenham College six years, 
and took four scholarships and many prizes at the school, 
the most interesting of which, in view of my after life, was 
the prize for the English Poem. I was also Senior Prefect, 
Editor of the school magazine. Captain of Football, and 
Captain of the Rifle Corps. I shot for the school four times 
in the Public School competitions at Wimbledon, and in 1874 
won the Spencer Cup, which was open to the best shot from 
each of the Public Schools. I was the school representative 
for it also in 1873. 

At Cheltenham, I suppose, I laid the foundations of my 
literary career, because, besides editing the school magazine 
for a couple of years, and writing the Prize Poem, I read 
every book in the College library. It was such a delight to 
me to have the run of a well-stocked library. The books at 
home were nearly all religious books. I was brought up on 
the sternest low-Church lines ; we went to church twice a day 
on Sunday, besides having prayers read twice at home, and 
hymns sung in the afternoon. The church we attended was 
St. Paul's, Onslow Square, where I had to listen to hour-long 
sermons from Capel Molyneux and Prebendary Webb- 
Peploe. The dull and long services were almost intolerable, 
except when Millais, the great painter, who had the next 
pew, asked me into his pew to relieve the crush in ours. 
Millais sat so upright and so forward when he was listening 
that my father could not see me, and I used to bury my 
face in the beautiful Mrs. Millais' sealskin jacket; I had 
such an admiration for her that I did not go to sleep. Millais 
— he was not Sir John in those days — did not make his children 
go to church ; I suppose he went because he was fascinated 
by the eloquence of the sermons. Molyneux, Marston and 
Peploe were all great preachers, though they bored an un- 
fortunate small boy to the verge of nervous prostration. 
We were only allowed to read Sunday books on Sunday, and 
the newspapers were put away, as they were to the day of 
my father's death in 1910. 

After my mother's death I always longed to get back to 
school, because, though we had to go to chapel every day. 



8 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

and twice on Sunday, there was not that atmosphere of 
rehgion which made me, as a small boy, begin to feel unhappy 
about lunch-time on Saturday, and not thoroughly relieved 
till after breakfast on Monday. I hated Sunday at home; 
the two-mile walk to and from church was the best part 
of it. 

I have forgotten two other preparations for a literary 
career which I perpetrated at Cheltenham. I and my 
greatest friend, a boy called Walter Roper Lawrence (now 
Sir W. R. Lawrence, Bart., G.C.I.E.), who afterwards rose 
to a position of the highest eminence in India, wrote verses 
for the school magazine, and I published a pamphlet to 
avenge a contemptuous reference, in the Shotover Papers, 
and was duly summoned for libel. The late Frederick 
Stroud, the Recorder of Tewkesbury, who was at that time a 
solicitor, got me off. I never saw him in after life, which 
I much regretted, because he was, like myself, a great student 
of everything connected with Adam Lindsay Gordon, the 
Australian poet. He died while I was writing our life of 
Gordon. 

At the beginning of 1875 I won an open classical scholar- 
ship at Trinity College, Oxford, where I commenced residence 
in the following October. At Oxford again I read voraciously 
in the splendid library of the Union. 

There my love of games continued unabated. I shot 
against Cambridge four years, and won all the shooting 
challenge-cups. I also played in the 'Varsity Rugby Union 
Football XV when I first went up. 

I had delightful old panelled rooms on Number 7 staircase 
— a chance fact, which won me a great honour and pleasure. 
One afternoon, when I came in from playing football, the 
College messenger met me, saying, " Grand company in your 
rooms this afternoon, Mr. Sladen — the President, and all the 
Fellows, and Cardinal Nooman," and he added, " When the 
President looked at your mantelpiece, sir, he cor fed.'' My 
mantelpiece was strewn with portraits of Maud Branscombe, 
Eveleen Rayne, Mrs. Rousby, and other theatrical stars of 
that day — about a couple of dozen of them. 

Shortly afterwards the President's butler arrived with a 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 9 

note, which I supposed was to reproach me with the racy 
appearance of my mantelpiece, but it was to ask me to spend 
the evening with the President, because Cardinal Newman 
had expressed a desire to meet the present occupant of his 
rooms. 

The Cardinal, a wan little man with a shrivelled face and 
a large nose, and one of the most beautiful expressions which 
ever appeared on a human being, talked to me for a couple 
of hours, prostrating me with his exquisite modesty. He 
wanted to know if the snapdragons, to which he had written 
a poem, still grew on the wall between Trinity and Balliol; 
he wanted to compare undergraduate life of his day with the 
undergraduate life of mine ; he asked me about a number of 
Gothic fragments in Oxford which might have perished 
between his day and mine, and fortunately, I had already 
conceived the passion for Gothic architecture which pervades 
my books, and was able to tell him about every one. He 
told me the marks by which he knew that those were his 
rooms ; he asked me about my studies, and hobbies, and aims 
in life ; I don't think that I have ever felt any honour of the 
kind so much. 

At Oxford I spent every penny I could afford, and more, 
on collecting a library of standard works, and I have many 
of them still. I remember that the literary Oxonians of that 
day discussed poetry much more than prose, and could mostly 
be classified into admirers of William Morris and admirers of 
Swinburne, and I think the Morrisians were more numerous. 
All of them had an academic admiration for Matthew Arnold's 
poems, and could spout from " Thyrsis " and the " Scholar 
Gipsy," which was compared with Keat's " Ode to a 
Nightingale." 

Thackeray's daughter (Lady Ritchie) was at that time the 
latest star in fiction, as I occasionally remind her. 

I had the good fortune to know some of the greatest of the 
authors who lived at Oxford when I was an undergraduate — 
Max Miiller, Bishop Stubbs the historian, Edward Augustus 
Freeman, Lewis Carroll, Dean Kitchin, Canon Bright and 
W. L. Courtney. 

Oxford in those days (as I suppose it does still) revolved 



10 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

largely round " Bobby Raper," then Dean of Trinity, a 
man of infinite tact and kindness, swift to discern ability 
and character in an undergraduate, and to make a friend 
of their owner, and blessed with a most saving sense of 
humour. When they had finished at Oxford, a word from 
him found them coveted masterships, or secretaryships to 
Public Men. He was the link between Oxford and Public 
life, as much as Jowett — the " Jowler " himself — who sat 
in John Wycliffe's seat at Balliol. Lord Milner, St. John 
Brodrick and George Curzon have gone farthest of the 
Balliol men of my time. Asquith was before me, Edward 
Grey after. Trinity ran to Bishops. Most of the men 
who sat at the scholars' table at Trinity in my time who 
went into Holy Orders are Bishops now, Archie Robertson, 
now Bishop of Exeter, being the senior of them. Bishop 
Gore of Oxford, who had rooms on the same floor as I had, 
and was one of my greatest friends in my first year, was the 
Junior Fellow. He was a very well-off young man, and used 
to spend huge sums on buying folios of the Latin Fathers, 
and then learn them by heart. There is no one who knows 
so much about the Fathers as the Bishop of Oxford. The 
present Archbishop of Canterbury was at Trinity, but before 
my time, and so was Father Stanton, who went there because 
he came of a hunting family, and it was a hunting College, 
and he was a Rugby man. Bishop Stubbs and Freeman were 
also Trinity men, and generally at the College Gaudies, where 
the Scholars used to dine at the same table as the Dons and 
their guests. Sir Richard Burton came once to a Gaudy 
when I was there, and told me that he was very surprised 
that they had asked him, because he had been sent down. 

I said, " You are in very good company. The great Lord 
Chatham and Walter Savage Landor were sent down from 
Trinity as well as you." 

But one well-known literary man of the present day holds 
the record over them all, because he was sent down from 
Trinity twice. 

Although I was a classical scholar, I refused to go in for 
Classics in the Final Schools. " Greats," otherwise Literce 
HumanioreSf as this school is called at Oxford, embraces the 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 11 

study of Philosophy in the original Greek and Latin of Plato, 
Aristotle and Cicero, and Philosophy and Logic generally. 
I was sick of the Classics, and I never could take the smallest 
interest in Philosophy, so I knew that I should do no good 
in this school, and announced my intention of going in for 
the School of Modern History. This was too revolutionary 
for my tutor. He said — 

" Classical scholars are expected to go in for Greats, and 
if you fail to do so, we shall have to consider the taking away 
of your scholarship." 

I was astute in my generation ; I went to Gore (the Bishop), 
who was my friend, and always met undergraduates as if he 
were one of themselves, and said to him, " Will you do 
something for me. Gore? " 

" It depends on what it is," he replied, with his curious 
smile. 

" Tell the Common-room (^^ e. the Dons, who used to 
meet in the Common-room every night after dinner) that I 
really mean to go in for History whether they take away my 
scholarship or not, but that if they do take it away, I shall 
take my name off the books of Trinity and go and ask Jowett 
if he will admit me at Balliol. You were a Balliol under- 
grad; you know the kind of answer that Jowett would 
make to a man who was willing to give up an eighty pounds 
a year scholarship in order to go in for the School which 
interested him." 

" Jowett will take you," he said, " but I will see what 
can be done here." 

That night I received the most unpleasant note an under- 
graduate can receive — a command to meet the Common- 
room at ten o'clock the next morning. They were all present 
when I went in. The President invited me to take a seat, 
and my tutor (the Rev. H. G. Woods, now Master of the 
Temple, of whom I still see something) said — 

" Are you quite determined to go in for the School of 
History, Mr. Sladen ? " 

" Quite," I replied. 

" Then we hope that the degree you take will justify us in 
assenting to such a very unusual procedure." 



12 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Then they all smiled very pleasantly, and I thanked them 
and went out. 

They must have felt quite justified when, two years after- 
wards, I took my First in History with congratulatory letters 
from all my examiners, while all the scholars of Trinity who 
went in for the School of Literce Humaniores took Seconds 
and Thirds. I should have got a Fourth, I am convinced. 

Again I read voraciously. For the first year I hardly 
bothered about my text-books at all. I read biographies, 
books about architecture and art and literature, historical 
novels, the writings of historical personages, everything 
which threw brilliant sidelights on my subject. And in the 
second year I learnt my text-books almost by heart, except 
Stubbs's Constitutional History and Selected Charters. I 
simply could not memorise them — they were so dry, and I 
hated the dry bones of Constitutional History almost as badly 
as philosophy. I learned digests of them, which took less 
time, and were no dryer, and proved equally efficacious in 
answering the papers. 

In after years, when I was entertaining Bishop Stubbs 
at a reception, which Montague Fowler and I gave in honour 
of Mark Twain at the Authors' Club, he roared with laughter 
when I told him that I got a First in History without reading 
his books, by learning the Digests of them by heart. 

He said, " I know they are dreadfully dull. Did you find 
my lectures very dull when you came to them? " He had 
not forgotten that I had attended his lectures for a couple 
of years. 

I said, " No, not at all." 

" Honestly, did you get any good from them ? " 

" Quite honestly? " 

He nodded. 

I said, " Not in the usual way." 

" Well," he asked, " how did you get any good from 
them?" 

" You must forgive me if I tell you." 

" Tell me; it cannot be worse than what you said about 
my books." 

" Well," I confessed, " the reason why I attended your 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 13 

lectures was that you never bothered as to whether I was 
there or not, and I hardly ever was there. I did not think any 
lectures were any good, but my tutor made me attend sixteen 
a week, and the time which I was supposed to spend at your 
lectures, I used to spend in my rooms reading. You were 
the only gentleman among my lecturers — all the rest used to 
call the names, and report me to my tutor if I was absent." 

He was immensely tickled, and said, " You deserved to get 
a First, if you took things as seriously as that." 

But Bishop Stubbs was very human. He always read the 
lightest novel he could lay hands on before he went to bed, 
to relieve his mind after working, and save him from insomnia. 

" They are so light," he said, " that I keep other books 
in front of them in my book-case." 

As an author, I have found the education I was given and 
gave myself a very useful foundation. Those ten years I 
gave to the study of Latin and Greek and classical history 
and mythology were not thrown away, because I have 
written so many books about Italy and Sicily and Egypt, in 
which having the classics at my fingers' ends made me 
understand the history, and the allusions in the materials 
I had to digest. It is impossible to write freely about Italy 
and Greece unless you know your classics. 

The two years of incessant study which I gave to taking 
my degree in Modern History at Oxford have been equally 
useful, because it is impossible to write guide-books and 
books of travel unless you have a sound knowledge of history. 

For a brief while my degree in history had a most practical 
and technical value, for it won me the Chair of Modern 
History in the University of Sydney, New South Wales. 

Beyond a week or two in Paris, I had never left England 
before 1 went to Australia in the end of 1879, a few months 
after I left Oxford, but I knew my England pretty well, 
because my father had always encouraged me to see the 
parts of England which contained the finest scenery and the 
architectural chefs d'ceuvres, like cathedrals. Ireland I had 
never visited, and of Scotland I only knew Dumfriesshire, 
where my father rented a shooting-box and a moor for four 
years ; and where I had enjoyed splendid rough shooting when 



14 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

I was a boy, in the very heart of the land of Burns. " The 
Grey Mare's Tail " was on one shooting which we had, and the 
Carlyle cottage was right under our Craigenputtock shooting. 

When I left Oxford my father gave me three hundred 
pounds to spend on a year of travel, and I chose to go to 
Australia to stay with his eldest brother, Sir Charles Sladen, 
K.C.M.G., who had been Prime Minister of the Colony of 
Victoria, and was at that time leader of the Upper House, and 
of the Constitutional Party in Victoria. I wanted to see if 
I should like to settle in the Colonies, and go to the Bar with 
a view to a political career. We were not rich enough for 
me to think of the House of Commons seriously, and I have 
always taken a very keen interest in politics. 

Further, I wanted to go and stay on my uncle's station 
to get some riding and shooting, and to see something of the 
outdoor life of Australia, of which I had heard so much. 
And I wanted desperately to try living in a hot country. I 
knew by intuition that I should like heat. 

I had not been staying with my uncle for a year before 
I had made up my mind to live in Australia, a conclusion to 
which I was assisted by my marriage with Miss Margaret 
Isabel Muirhead, the daughter of a Scotsman from Stirling, 
who had owned a fine station called the Grampians in the 
Western District of Victoria, and had been killed in a horse 
accident. As I had not been called to the Bar before I left 
home, I found that I had to go through a two years' course, 
and take a law degree at the Melbourne University. This 
I did, though the position was sufficiently anomalous. For 
instance, I had to attend lectures by a Member of the Govern- 
ment, the Solicitor-General. I knew him intimately at the 
Melbourne Club and in private life, and we generally used to 
walk down to the Club after the lecture. Sometimes we 
went into a pub, to have a drink together, and we discussed 
anything from the forthcoming Government Bills to Club 
stories. He told me one day, before the public knew any- 
thing about it, of the intention of the Government to bring 
in a Bill to make sweeps on racing illegal. As much as forty- 
five thousand pounds had been subscribed for the Melbourne 
Cup Sweep the year before. 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 15 

I said, " It is no good making them illegal ; it only means 
that they will be carried on under the rose, and that a whole 
lot of the sweeps will be bogus. You can't stop sweeps ; all 
you can do is to put the bogus sweep on a level with Jimmy 
Miller's." 

" What would you do, then? " he asked. 

" Well, if you really want to stop them, you should legalise 
them, and put a twenty-five per cent., or fifty per cent, for 
the matter of that, tax upon them. You'd spoil the odds 
so that sweeps would die a natural death ; and if they didn't, 
you'd get a nice lot of money to save the taxpayer's pocket. 
You would be like the Prince of Monaco, who lives by the 
gambling at Monte Carlo." 

He duly put the suggestion before the Government, but 
they thought that this would be paltering with eternal sin, 
and passed their Bill to help the bogus-sweep promoter. 

This same man and I were asked one night to take part 
in a Shakespeare reading at the Prime Minister's. My friend 
was late, and the Prime Minister, who was not a discreet 
man, began talking about him. Somebody remarked what 
a wonderfully well-informed man he was. 

" Yes," said the Prime Minister, " my Solicitor-General is 
one of those people who know nothing about everything. And 
the way he does it is that he never opens a book ; he just reads 
what the magazines and papers have to say about books." 

Suddenly the Premier felt that his remarks were no longer 
being received with enthusiasm, and looking up, saw his 
Solicitor-General waiting to shake hands with him. 

At the Melbourne University I formed one intimate 
friendship, which has lasted ever since. Among my fellow- 
students was Dr. George Ernest Morrison, the famous Times 
correspondent of Peking. He was famous in those days as 
the finest football player in the Colony, and he began his 
adventures while he was at the University. For months 
we missed him ; nobody knew where he was — or if his father, 
who was head master of Geelong College, did know, he never 
told. Then suddenly he turned up again, and said that he 
had been walking from Cape York, which was the northern- 
most point of Australia, to Melbourne. He had undertaken 



16 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

—and I don't think he had any bet on it — to make his way 
from Cape York to Melbourne, alone, unarmed and without 
a penny in his pocket. In the northernmost part of his 
journey, at any rate, there were a great many wild blacks, 
and many rivers full of crocodiles to swim. But there are, 
of course, no large carnivora in Australia, and a snake can 
be killed with a stick. When he was swimming a river he 
used to construct a raft, and put his clothes and his pack on 
it; he carried a pack like any other sun-downer, and when 
he got to a station, did his bit of work to pay for his bed 
and supper, and when he left it, if the next station south 
was more than a day's journey, he was given enough food 
to carry him through. This is, of course, the universal 
custom in Australia when a man is going from station to 
station in search of work, such as shearing. 

He had not a single misadventure. The reason why he 
took so long was that his way from station to station naturally 
took him out of the direct line to the south, and he made a 
stay at some of them. The newspapers were so impressed 
with his feat that, shortly afterwards, when the Age organised 
an expedition to explore New Guinea, he was given command 
of it. That was the last I saw of Morrison till we met a few 
years afterwards at my house in London. 

I never practised for the Melbourne Bar, for no sooner 
had I taken my law degree than I was appointed to the 
vacant chair of Modern History in the University of Sydney. 

I had, since I landed in Australia, made my debut as an 
author, and had already published two volumes of verse, 
Friihjoj and Ingebjorg and Australian Lyrics. During the 
year that I held my chair, we had apartments in the Old 
Government House, Parramatta, which had become a 
boarding-house, and spent our vacations on the Hawkesbury 
and in the Blue Mountains. 

While I was at Parramatta I published a third volume of 
verse, A Poetry of Exiles. 

Then occurred an event which deprived me of one of my 
principal reasons for remaining in Australia, the premature 
death of my uncle. This closed my short cut to a political 
career; and I had long since come to the conclusion that 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 17 

Australia was not the place for a literary career, because 
there was no real publishing in Australia. Publishers were 
merely booksellers, who acted as intermediaries between 
authors and printers; they took no risks of publication; 
the author paid, and they received one commission as 
publishers and another as booksellers. This did not signify 
much for verse; the printing bill for books of verse is not 
large, and poets are accustomed to bringing out their works 
at their own risk in other countries besides Australia. But 
a large prose work of a hundred or a hundred and fifty 
thousand words is, at Australian prices, extremely expensive 
to produce, and when it is produced, has only a small sale 
because it does not bear the name of any well-known English 
publishing house. 

So I suddenly made up my mind to return to England. 

The five years I spent in Australia were fruitful for my 
career as an author, though I have never published anything 
about Australia, except my own verses, and anthologies of 
Australian verse, and a life, and an edition of the poems, of 
Adam Lindsay Gordon. The last was phenomenally suc- 
cessful ; I am sure that no volume of Browning has ever sold 
so well. And one of the anthologies had a sale of twenty 
thousand copies in the first ten years of its existence. 

Australia supplied exactly the right element for my 
development. At Cheltenham I was the most prominent 
boy of my time, and the prestige with which I came up from 
school gave me a certain momentum at Oxford. So I went 
out to Australia with a very good opinion of Public Schools, 
and Oxford, and myself. 

I soon discovered that nothing was of any importance in 
Australia except sport and money. If Tennyson or Walter 
Scott had gone to a bush-township, he would have been 
judged merely by his proficiency or absence of proficiency 
as a groom. Horsemanship is the one test of the inhabitants 
of a bush-township. 

In Melbourne and Sydney and on " stations " it was 
different. Hospitality was prodigal, and there was a dis- 
position to regard with charity one's shortcomings from the 
Colonial point of view, and to accept with sympathy the fact 



18 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

that one had distinguished oneself elsewhere. The Australian 
man is very manly, and very hearty ; the Australian woman 
is apt to be very pretty, and to have a strong personality — 
to be full of character as a lover. 

The climate of Australia I found absolutely delightful. 
It is a land of eternal summer : its winters are only cooler 
summers. The unchanging blue of its skies is appalling to 
those whose prosperity depends on the rainfall. 

When I went out to Australia, just after leaving Oxford, 
I was enough of a prig to profit very greatly by being suddenly 
thrown into an absolutely democratic community. I was 
saved from finding things difficult by the fact that I was 
born a Bohemian, in spite of my very conventional parentage, 
and really did delight in roughing it. The free and easy 
Colonial life was a great relief to me after the prim life in 
my English home; and staying about on the great stations 
in the western district of Victoria, which belonged to various 
connections of my family, furnished the finest experience of 
my early life. I spent most of my first year in Australia 
in that way, returning, in between, to pay visits to my uncle 
at Geelong. Being in the saddle every day never lost its 
thrill for me, because I had hardly ever been on a horse 
before I went to Australia; and wandering about the big 
paddocks and the adjoining stretches of forest, gun in 
hand — I hardly ever went out without a gun — had some- 
thing of the excitement of the books about the American 
backwoods which I read in my boyhood. It is true that 
I would rather have shot grizzly bears than the native bears 
of Australia, mere sloths, and lions and tigers than kangaroos, 
but a big " forester " is not to be sneezed at, and Australia 
has an extraordinary wealth of strange birds — the cockatoos 
and parrots and parakeets alone give a sort of tropical aspect 
to the forest, and the snakes give an unpleasantly tropical 
aspect, though, fortunately, in Australia, they shrink from 
human habitations. 

When I married I went to live in Melbourne, close to public 
gardens of extraordinary beauty and almost tropical luxuri- 
ance, and soon became absorbed in the maelstrom of dancing 
and playing tennis, and watching first-class cricket and racing. 



MY LIFE (1856-1886) 19 

When we went to Parramatta it was easy to make excur- 
sions to the marvellous gorges of the Blue Mountains, which 
are among the grandest valley scenery in the world. 

Everything was large, and free, and sparsely inhabited — 
most expanding to the mind, and the glimpse of the tropical 
glories of Oriental Ceylon, which I enjoyed for four days 
on my voyage home, made me hear the " East a callin' " for 
ever afterwards. 

I found London desperately dull when we returned to it 
in 1884. I had no literary friends, except at Oxford, where 
we took a house for three months to get some colour into life 
again. It was on the banks of the Cherwell, facing the most 
beautiful buildings of Magdalen, and the Gothic glories of 
Oxford were manna to my hungry soul. 

The summer, spent in Devonshire and Cornwall and 
Scotland, was well enough, and in the winter, which we 
spent at Torquay, we had grand scenery and beautiful 
ancient buildings, but the climate seemed treacherous and 
cold after the fierce bright summers of Australia. 

I must not forget that I came very near not going to 
Australia at all. I felt the parting with my father extremely, 
and he was quite prostrated by it. I had, a few days before 
starting, been introduced to the captain of the old Orient 
liner Lusitania, in which I made the voyage — a hard, reckless 
sea-dog — and he did me good service on that occasion. Two 
letters came on board for me when we put in at Plymouth to 
pick up the last mails and passengers. One of these letters 
contained a letter from my father to the effect that if I wished 
to give up^the passage and return home I might do so. The 
captain, for some reason or other, whether from having had 
a conversation with my father, or what, suspected that the 
letter might have some message of that kind — he may have 
had the same thing occurring in his experience before — so he 
did not give me the letter till the next day, when I had no 
possible chance of communicating with England until I got 
to the Cape de Verde Islands. By that time, of course, I 
had thoroughly settled down to the enjoyments of the 
voyage, and looked at the matter in a different light. 



CHAPTER II 

MY LIFE (1886-1888) 

About this time I was struck with the idea that for a 
person who intended to make his Hving by writing books, 
Travel was a necessity, and while one had no ties, it cost no 
more to live in various parts of the Continent than to live 
in London. 

The desire materialised sooner than it might have done, 
because Arthur Chamberlain, whom we had met when we 
were sharing a house in Scotland with the Wilkies (wife and 
daughters of the famous Melbourne doctor), wrote letters, 
which would brook no refusal, for us to come and join him at 
Heidelberg, where he was now a student, for the Quincen- 
tenary of the Heidelberg University. 

Before we went abroad we had a foretaste of the many 
pilgrimages to archaeological paradises which we were to 
make. We spent six weeks at Canterbury, peculiarly delight- 
ful to me, because my family have been landowners in East 
Kent from time immemorial, which made the neighbourhood 
of Canterbury full of landmarks for me, and Canterbury is, 
after Oxford, fuller of the Middle Ages than any town in 
England. Here, having the run of the Cathedral library 
given me by its curator. Dr. Shepherd (I hope I have spelt his 
name right), I commenced my studies of Edward, the Black 
Prince — the local hero, who lies buried in the Cathedral. 
This led to my writing the most ambitious of my poems, 
'* Edward, the Black Prince." I wrote it among the ruins of 
the old Cathedral Monastery at Canterbury, and the first 
edition was printed in the Piazza of Santa Croce at Florence. 

At Heidelberg, living for economy in a delightful pension 
kept by Miss Abraham, who had been the Kaiser's English 
governess, we met the set who pass their years in wandering 

20 



MY LIFE (1886-1888) 21 

from one pension to another on the Continent. Our imme- 
diate future was marked out for us. One family booked us 
for a favourite pension at Zurich, another for Lucerne, 
another for Lugano, another for Florence, another for Rome, 
another for Castellamare di-Stabia below Pompeii. 

And so we began the great trek. We summered at Heidel- 
berg. Autumn in Switzerland was perfectly beautiful, 
but the two or three months which we spent in Florence 
formed one of the turning-points of my life. It was there 
that we found a pension, which called itself an hotel, replete 
with the atmosphere and charm and the little luxuries which 
Italy knows so well how to give for seven francs a day. 
There we met people who came to Florence year after year, 
and knew every picture, almost every stone, in it — almost 
every ounce of pleasure which was to be got out of it. They 
initiated us, in fact, into Florence, which was more of an 
education than anything in the world. 

Florence is Renaissance in architecture, Gothic in feeling. 
Its inhabitants, native and foreign, live in the past. It 
was here that I, born with a passion for realising the Middle 
Ages, acquired the undying desires which have taken me 
back so often and for such long periods, and have inspired 
me to write so many books about Italy and Sicily. From the 
very beginning I plunged into the life of Florence and the 
study of things Italian with extraordinary zest. 

Going on to Rome for a month or two inspired me with the 
same feeling for the classics as Florence had inspired in me 
for the Middle Ages. 

I own that, when I was persuaded to go on from Rome to 
Castellamare, I did so with certain misgivings. There did 
not seem to be the same chances in it. We were going to a 
villa outside the town, whose sole attraction seemed to be 
that it was six miles from Pompeii. 

But when we got there, it had a profound influence on 
our lives. It proved to be the villa where the Countess of 
Blessingtonhad entertained Byron and others of the immortals, 
a beautiful southern house, standing on the green hill which 
buries in its bosom the ashes of Vesuvius, and the ruins of 
Stabiae, a city which shared the fate of Pompeii. It had 



22 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

a vineyard round it ; its quaint garden was overrun with sleepy 
lizards, which you never catch asleep — the lizards in which 
the genius of Italy seems to live. 

We saw the sunset every night on the Bay of Naples and 
Ischia, which all the world was talking about then because 
of the earthquake which had lately ravished it. Every night 
we saw a tree of fire rising from Vesuvius. 

We used to spend our days in the orange groves of Sor- 
rento, or driving in donkey-carts to Pompeii, that city of 
the resurrection of the ancient world. The weather was 
somnolently mild; for the first time we were eating of the 
fruit of the lotus, which we have eaten so often since, and 
which has pervaded my writings. 

If Castellamare had only done that for us, it would be a 
milestone in my life, but it also planted the seeds of unrest — 
die Wanderlust — in my veins. Some one we met there — I 
don't remember who it was now — had a craze for Greek ruins ; 
Roman ruins meant nothing to him, he said; there were 
only two places for him, Athens and Sicily. 

In Sicily it was Girgenti which won his heart, not Syracuse 
or Taormina, and he almost persuaded us to go there. He 
obviously preferred it, even to Athens. But the name meant 
nothing to me; I had read of Agrigentum in the classics, 
and he showed me photographs of the glorious Greek temples, 
which are still preserved in the environs of modern Girgenti. 
Athens, on the contrary, had been before my mind ever since 
I was a boy. The literature of Greece is, with the exception 
of Homer and Theocritus, roughly speaking, the literature 
of Athens. I knew most of its principal buildings almost as 
well as if I had seen them. I heard the call of Athens, and to 
Athens we went from Castellamare. 

Going there showed how comparatively cheap and easy 
it is to get to distant places. We went through Taranto — 
Tarentum — to Brindisi ; from Brindisi to Corfu, in the Ionian 
Islands, the earthly paradise of the fair Nausicaa, and the 
empresses of to-day; from Corfu to Patras and Corinth; 
from Corinth to Athens. 

The moral effect began before ever we reached Athens; 
it was so vivifying to a student of the classics to pass Taren- 



MY LIFE (1886-1888) 23 

turn, and Caesar's Brundusium, the Lesbos of Sappho, the 
Ithaca of Ulysses, Corinth and the Pirseus. 

Lesbos ! Corinth ! Athens ! Sappho ! Ulysses ! there 
was romance and undying poetry in the very names. 

The Greece of those days really was something out of the 
beaten track. There were only two little railways of a few 
miles each, and there was not an hotel worthy of the name 
anywhere outside of Athens. Even in Athens, if you were 
not at a first-class hotel, kid's flesh, and sheep's-milk butter, 
black bread and honey of Hymettus, and wine which was 
full of resin, were the staples of diet. But what did it matter ? 
We lived in a house and a street with beautiful classical 
names — we lived in the house of Hermes. And when we 
climbed up to the Acropolis at sunset, we were in an enchanted 
land midway between earth and heaven, for we were in the 
very heart of history surrounded by milk-white columns of 
the marble of Pentelicus, and facing a rich curtain of sunset, 
which hung over ^gina, and trailed into the waters of the 
Bay of Salamis. Athens is gloriously romantic and beautiful, 
and Time has laid its lightest fingers on her rocks and ruins, 
whose names are the commonplaces of Greek history. 

We spent some glorious weeks at Athens, made interesting 
by the acquaintance of Tricoupis, the famous Prime Minister, 
and the presence of the President of my college at Oxford — 
now Bishop of Hereford, from whom I heard only the other 
day. From Athens Miss Lorimer's unappeasable hunger 
to see the world swept us on, after several happy weeks, to 
Constantinople — the outpost of the East in Europe. Con- 
stantinople was one of the most delightful experiences of 
my life. There is no call which I hear like the call of the East, 
and in Constantinople you have the noblest mosques west of 
India, and bazaars almost as barbarous as the bazaars of 
North Africa, thronged, like the broad bridge of boats which 
crosses the Golden Horn, with the mixed races of the Levant, 
in their gay, uncouth costumes. The scene, too, is one of 
rare beauty, for the great mosques are rooted in dark cypress- 
groves, and rear their domes and minarets on the horizon, 
and the calm waters of the Golden Horn and the Sea of 
Marmora are dotted with fantastic caiques. 



24 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

We spent all too short a time there, dipping into the 
bowl of Oriental mystery, in perfect April weather, when 
we were called home to meet a sister-in-law coming from 
Australia. 

I had, in the interval, published two more volumes of verse, 
A Summer Christmas and In Cornwall and Across the Sea, 
and I had printed at Florence Edward, the Black Prince, begun 
during that long visit to Canterbury in the spring of 1886, 
during which I steeped myself deeper and deeper in the study 
of Gothic architecture, not yet realising what an important 
part it was to play in my writing. 

When we returned from Constantinople I had The Black 
Prince properly published in England, and though its sales 
were trifling, like those of A Summer Christmas, it met with 
warm commendation from the critics. 

Shortly after this we were inspired with the desire to visit 
the United States in the autumn of 1888, and as we were 
going so far, we determined so stay in one place while we 
were in England. 

The place we chose was Richmond. I had always loved it 
since I was a little boy at Temple Grove School in the neigh- 
bouring village of East Sheen. It was sufficiently in the 
country for us to pass a spring and summer there without 
irksomeness, and sufficiently beautiful and old-fashioned 
to satisfy my cravings. 

At Richmond we took a house in the Queen's Road, and but 
for the very large sum demanded for fixtures, we should have 
abandoned our American trip, and taken the part of the Old 
Palace which has now been restored at great expense by 
Mr. J. L. Middleton, for which I had a great inclination. 
Mr. Middleton is a friend of mine and I have been over it many 
times with him. It stands right opposite my study window. 
We liked Richmond as much then as we do now, except for the 
long trail up from the railway station to the Queen's Road 
when we went to the theatre. We were in the Park or on 
the adjoining commons every day, watching the operations 
of Nature from the growth to the fall. 

It was a busy time, for I wrote The Spanish Armada on 
the occasion of the Tercentenary of the immortal sea-fight, 



MY LIFE (1886-1888) 25 

and I edited two anthologies of Australian verse, Australian 
Ballads and A Century of Australian Song, for Walter Scott, 
Ltd. The pleasure of compiling these two anthologies, the 
first books by which I ever made any money, was enhanced 
because I did them at the unsolicited invitation of the late 
William Sharp, the poet and author of the rhapsodies of 
'' Fiona Macleod," who afterwards became a dear and intimate 
friend. He introduced me to Charles Mackay, the editor 
of the famous Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry, 
who adopted Marie Corelli as his daughter, and was father 
of Eric Mackay. It was through him that I received the 
invitation to do the Australian part of the Slang Dictionary, 
edited by M. Barrere, the French Ambassador's brother, for 
which also I received some money. 

These encouragements made me ask my friend, the late 
S. H. Jeyes, who went to Trinity, Oxford, on the same day as 
I did, and was at the time one of the editors of the St. James's 
Gazette, from which he afterwards changed to the Standard, 
whether he thought that I ought to go to America, or stay and 
pursue my chances in England. 

He said, " Go ; in America they will take you at your own 
valuation, and when you get back, it will be your valuation." 

And so it came that we took our passages in the old 
Cunarder Catalonia from Liverpool to Boston. 



CHAPTER III 

I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 

The only literary at homes I had been to before I went 
to America were Edmund Gosse's in Delamere Terrace, 
Louise Chandler Moulton's in Weymouth Street, and W. E. 
Henley's in an old house in which he resided at Chiswick. 

I have written elsewhere how the Gosses used to receive 
their friends on Sunday afternoons. Not many came, but 
those who did come were generally famous in the world of 
letters. 

Mrs. Moulton, on the other hand, often had a crowd at 
her receptions. It was in her drawing-room that I first met 
Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mrs. Alexander the novelist, and 
Coulson Kernahan, and Theodore Watts. She herself was a 
charming poet, and liked entertaining poets. I met her 
first at Sir Bruce and Lady Seton's, at Durham House, which 
at that time contained the finest collection of modern 
paintings in London. 

It was fortunate that Henley's friends were devoted to 
him, because he was an invalid and could not get about. He 
was already a great power in journalism. His paper, called 
at first The Scots Observer, and later on The National Observer, 
had taken the place of the Saturday Review, which was not 
at that time conducted with the ability of the old Saturday, 
The men who gathered round him were very brilliant. I 
forget what evening of the week it was that he was at home, 
but whatever evening it was he kept it up very late, with much 
smoke and consumption of whiskey; and the conversation 
was always worth listening to. Henley was a magnificent 
talker, with a fund of curious knowledge, and he had a 
knack of turning the conversation on to some strange kind 
of sin or some strange kind of occultism, which was thoroughly 







M 4 



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THE AUTHOR 

Drawn by Yoshio Markino 



UNITED STATES AND CANADA 27 

threshed out by the clever people present. He rather liked 
morbid subjects. 

Edmund Gosse gave me introductions to H. O. Houghton, 
head of the publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 
and he and Henley and Katherine Tynan gave me intro- 
ductions to various authors. But my most useful intro- 
duction I had through my chief American friend of that 
time, Ada Loftus, who made the London correspondents 
of the New York Herald and the Boston Globe give full-length 
announcements of my approaching visit to America — as 
long as they would give to William Watson now. They 
labelled me in those announcements the " Australian Poet," 
and that label stuck to me during the whole of that visit to 
the United States. They asked Mrs, Loftus, I suppose, what I 
had done, and she told them that I had written several volumes 
of verse about Australia. Be that as it may, those friendly 
announcements resulted in so many hospitalities being offered 
to us by American authors and literary clubs that we really 
did not need our introductions, especially in Boston, where 
Mrs. Moulton was waiting to welcome us, and where I had 
old schoolfellows — the Peabodys — connected with most of 
the leading families. 

But I did present the introduction to Mr. Houghton — when 
does an author neglect an introduction to a publisher ? — and 
he showed us innumerable kindnesses all the time we remained 
in Boston. It was to him that I owed the invitations from 
Oliver Wendell Holmes and Whittier, and Longfellow's 
family to visit them in their homes — inestimable opportunities. 
We spent three months in Boston, seeing all the best of Boston 
literary society and the University bigwigs at Harvard, 
and then we went for a month to New York until it was time 
for the ice-carnival season at Montreal. At New York, with 
Edmund Clarence Stedman, the first of American critics, 
as a godfather, the hospitalities of Boston were repeated 
to us. But this was not our principal visit to New York. 

Our first trip to Canada was intensely interesting to us, 
because there we were in a new world, where the temperature 
was below zero, and the snow several feet high in the streets, 
and the ice several feet thick on the great river, up which 



28 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

ocean liners come from spring to autumn. The ice-palace 
was already built, and rose like a mediaeval castle of alabaster ; 
in the centre of the city the habitants were selling their milk 
in frozen lumps in the market; all the world wore furs, for 
the poorest could buy a skin of some sort made up somehow. 
There were still buffalo-skin coats in those days in plenty, 
at three pounds apiece, and those who could not afford a fur 
cap to their liking, wore a woollen tobogganing tuque, which 
could be drawn down over the forehead and the ears, just 
as some of the younger women and the children wore their 
blanket tobogganing coats. 

It was a new world, where nobody skated in the open, 
because of the impossibility of keeping the ice free from snow, 
and where skating was so universal an accomplishment 
that in the rinks people danced on skates as naturally as on 
their feet in a ballroom. 

One soon took for granted the monstrous cold, learned to 
swathe in furs every time one left the house, even if it was 
only to go to the post, to wear thin boots, because they were 
always covered with " arctics " when one went out, and thin 
underclothing because one's furs were so thick out of doors, 
and the houses so furiously hot indoors; to have double 
windows always closed, and hot air flowing into the room 
till the temperature reached 70° and over. 

It is no wonder that ice-cream, as they call it, is a feature 
at dinner in winter|^in a Canadian hotel. 

Outside, all the land was white, and all the sky was blue. 
Wrapped up in furs, people so despised the intense cold that 
there was not one closed sleigh — at Montreal in winter all 
the cabs were sleighs. By day we sleighed up the mountain 
for tobogganing and came back in time for tea-parties; by 
night we sleighed to dances or picnics. The merry jingle of 
sleigh-bells was never out of one's ears ; and everything was 
so delightfully simple — it was always beer and not champagne 
— and every one took an interest in Australia and Colonial 
poetry. The tea-parties were generally impromptus got up 
on the telephone. Every one in Montreal had a telephone, 
though it was only the beginning of 1889. 

Lighthall, the Canadian litterateur, came to call upon us 



UNITED STATES AND CANADA 29 

the very first afternoon that we were in Montreal, and he 
introduced us to our Ufe-Iong friends, the Robert Reids, and 
the George Washington Stephens's. Mrs. Reid and Mrs. 
Stephens were sisters. Mr. Stephens, the Astor of Montreal, 
shortly afterwards became Treasurer of the Colony. Light- 
hall introduced us also to Sir William Van Home, the Presi- 
dent of the great Canadian Pacific Railway, which led to 
important results. We only stayed in Canada a month then, 
but that was sufficient to convince me that I did not want to 
live in a climate where the cold was as dangerous as a tiger. 
It was brought home to me in an extraordinary way. I was 
out walking with Mrs. Reid's daughter, coming back from a 
tea-party one evening. We saw a drunken man lying in the 
gutter. She said, " We must get a sleigh and take that drunk 
to the police-station. He will be dead in an hour if he lies 
there." 

When roused, he was sufficiently coherent to tell us where 
he lived, and we took him home. The cold was so intense 
that she found one of her ears frost-bitten before she got home ; 
she had gone out in an ordinary hat instead of a fur cap, 
because it was a tea-party and near home. The unexpected 
delay in the open air to rouse the man, and driving him home, 
made her pay the penalty of risking a frost-bite. We knew 
that it was frost-bitten, because it had turned as white as if 
it had been powdered. The policeman took up a handful 
of snow, and rubbed it for her — another act of ordinary good 
Samaritanism in Canada. 

We went straight down from Canada to Washington to 
see the change of Administration from President Cleveland's 
regime to President Harrison's. The climatic contrast was 
strong; Washington was as warm as Rome. Our arctics 
and furs looked simply idiotic when we arrived in the 
station. 

The change of Administration in the United States is 
invested with a good deal of magnificence. All the important 
people in America, who can spare the time, go to Washington 
for it. There were many functions during our visit. We 
were President Cleveland's guests at his farewell-party, and 
went to all the Harrison functions. Mrs. Cleveland had a 



30 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

delightful personality; she was very pretty, very elegant, 
very gracious, a tall woman, rather suggestive of the beautiful 
Dowager Lady Dudley, with brilliant dark eyes and a 
brilliant smile. Cleveland was not a pleasant man to meet. 
When I knew him he was a very strong man who had 
become very stout. Everything about him suggested power. 
His face, in spite of its fleshiness, was very powerful. 
He had a deliberate, rather ungracious way of speaking, 
and his silences, accentuated by rather resentful eyes, were 
worse. But a man who starts to sweep the Augean stable 
for America needs these qualities; and he undoubtedly 
improved the tone of the party opposed to him in the State 
by giving them an opposition which they had to respect. 
But he had no conscience in foreign politics. 

The most interesting house we went to was Colonel John 
Hay's. Hay was a millionaire twice over, and had been 
Abraham Lincoln's private secretary. He was one of America's 
best poets, and no man in the country was more renowned for 
his personal charm or his lofty character. He was afterwards 
Secretary of State, and Ambassador to Great Britain, and 
could have been either then, if President Harrison had been 
able to overcome Hay's rooted objection to office. And 
Adalbert Hay, the American Consul-general, who did so much 
for captive Britons in the Boer War, was his son. 

At Hay's house you met alike the most famous politicians, 
the most famous members of the Diplomatic Corps, and the 
most famous authors and artists in America. There we met 
all the most distinguished members, perhaps I might say the 
leaders, of the Republican Party. 

Washington will always be a bright spot in my memory for 
another thing. Henry Savage Landor, the explorer, was 
turned out of his room because the whole hotel was wanted 
for President Harrison's party, and as there was not a room 
to be had in Washington, he slept for the remainder of the 
time on a shakedown in my room. Both he and I used to 
spend a great deal of our time with our next-door neighbour 
in K Street, General William Tecumseh Sherman, the hero 
of the famous march through Georgia in the Civil War — 
a grand old man, with a hard-bitten face, but very human. 



UNITED STATES AND CANADA 31 

I was present at his funeral in New York; thirty thousand 
veterans — " the Grand Army of the Repubhc " — marched 
behind the riderless horse, which bore his jack-boots and his 
sword. 

From Washington we went to New York, and stayed there 
till the heat drove us back to Canada, where we had an extra- 
ordinarily delightful holiday in store for us. Sir William 
Van Home had invited us to go as the guests of the Canadian 
Pacific Railway right over their line from Montreal to Van- 
couver and back, and as we had a month or more to spare 
before the time we settled for our journey, we went first of 
all to the land of Evangeline — Nova Scotia — and afterwards 
across the Bay of Fundy to the valley of the St. John river 
in New Brunswick, and thence to Quebec and Montreal, where 
we were the guests of the Reids, and for a fortnight of the 
Stephens's, in their summer home on the shores of Lac Eau 
Clair in the Maskinonge forest, and of Agnes Maule Machar 
at Gananoque on the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence. 
This experience of Canadian summer life was an extra- 
ordinary education in beauty. A more perfect summer 
could not be imagined; the sky was always blue, the sun 
was always vigorous, and there was generally a light breeze. 
We half lived on the water, since all Canadians near a river 
or lake have canoes and can manage them with the skill 
of an Indian. The bathing was enchanting : we could catch 
a hundredweight of fish sometimes, in that land of many 
waters. The wild flowers and wild fruits of the meadows 
and woods were as plentiful as buttercups and daisies in 
England; it was a land of many forests, many lakes, many 
rivers; mountains near or distant were always in sight. 

Nor was this all. On the lofty shores of the Bay of 
Fundy and the rock of Quebec, and under the " Royal Moun- 
tain " at Montreal there were dear old French houses, built 
in the days of the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Louis, and most 
of them intertwined in the romance of Canadian history. 

What a lovely and romantic land it was ! And we saw it 
to perfection, for Bliss Carman and Roberts, two Canadian 
poets, were our guides everywhere. In all my years in 
Australia I never had half the enjoyment out of the country- 



32 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

life that I derived from those two or three months of a 
Canadian summer. 

The wonders of our journey had hardly begun, though the 
first sight of the old fortress of Quebec towering over the St. 
Lawrence, and of the historic Fields of Abraham, are events 
never to be forgotten. 

Still, we felt that a new era in our lives was beginning on 
that night in early autumn when we steamed out of the chief 
station of the world's greatest railway westwards on a journey 
which would not terminate till we stood on the shores of 
English Bay, and looked out on to the Pacific Ocean. 

We were so anxious to hurry out west to the new land 
that we only spared ourselves a few days at Toronto to cross 
Lake Ontario to Niagara, and spend an afternoon and evening 
with Goldwin Smith and George Taylor Denison. They 
presented such a contrast — Goldwin Smith, the Cassandra 
whose voice was always lifted against his country, except 
when he was among her enemies, and Denison, a descendant 
of the famous Loyalist, and the leader of Canadian loyalty 
to England. Denison was the winner of the Emperor of 
Germany's prize for the best book on Cavalry Tactics. 

From Toronto we had not far to go by train before we 
found ourselves at Lake Huron, and took a steamer of the 
company, built like a sea-going vessel, to cross those two 
vast lakes, Huron and Superior, to Port Arthur. They look 
like seas, and have storms as violent, though they are fresh 
water, and in Lake Superior, at any rate, you could immerse 
the whole of the British Islands. From Port Arthur we 
trained to Winnipeg, the city of the plains, where we only 
stayed a few days before flying across the prairie — a limitless 
plain as broken as the Weald of Kent, jewelled with flowers 
in spring, and with game fleeing to the horizon when cover 
is short. 

After three days of eye-roaming, we woke to find our 
view barred by the long wall of the Rocky Mountains, like 
castles of the gods. 

At Banff, in the Rocky Mountains, we were to stay to 
contemplate the finest open mountain scenery conceivable, 
and at the Glacier House to contemplate a glacier, a forest 



UNITED STATES AND CANADA 33 

and a stupendous peak threatening to overwhelm a mountain 
inn. The scenery between the two was finer than anything 
in the Apennines, with its torrents dashing between mighty 
precipices, and its pine forests sweeping Uke a prairie fire 
over mountain and valley, and its background of heaven- 
piercing Alps. 

We entered the Glacier House at a dramatic moment, for 
Jim, the sports' guide from Missouri, had just finished pegging 
out on the floor of one of the sitting-rooms a trophy of his 
rifle that took me straight back to the happy hours of my 
boyhood which I spent with Captain Mayne Reid — the rust- 
coloured skin of a mighty grizzly bear which had turned the 
scale at twelve hundredweight. Jim the guide had on a 
buckskin coat and breeches, much stained with killing or 
skinning the bear : the spectacle was a most impressive one. 

From the glacier we tore down the valleys of the Thompson 
and the Fraser to Vancouver, then a new wooden town perched 
on a forest clearing with the tree stumps still scattered about 
its roads, but one of the great seaports of the world in embryo 
— Canada's Western Gate, the realisation of the dream of La 
Salle. 

We loved Vancouver, because here we were in a town and 
country in the making, with a glorious piece of the forest 
primeval preserved for ever as a national park. For a 
month we lived there, going every day to see the sun set over 
the ocean which divided us from the mysterious Orient — 
thinking over all that we had seen of a country which is like 
a continent, in that three or four thousand miles' journey 
on the newly-opened line. 

Then one day a little old bull-dog of a Cunarder, in the 
service of the great railway, ran up the harbour, and moored 
herself to the wharf beside the railway station, A tall dark 
officer, whose voice I heard across the telephone a few hours 
before writing these lines, was leaning over the gunwale. 
He and our party smiled pleasantly at each other, and he 
invited us to go on board. The litter of the Orient was about 
the decks. Chinese seamen and Japanese passengers were 
talking the pigeon-English of the East to each other. And we 
felt that here was the opportunity for stretching our hands 

D 



34 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

across to the East. I accepted the omen, and we booked our 
passages to Japan — drifting on as we had drifted ever since 
we landed at Boston a year before. 

The stout old Parthia was going to lie a week or two in 
port before she turned her head round for Yokohama and 
Hong Kong, and we spent most of this time in an excursion 
across the strait to Victoria, the capital of Vancouver's 
Island, a little bit of England in the West, with a dockyard 
still in Imperial hands. 

As we returned from Victoria early in November, we met, 
on the steamer, Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, who 
was about to be Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, 
on his way back from a Big-horn expedition in the North. 

" Where are you on your way to ? " he asked me. 

" Japan," I replied. 

"What now?" he said; "you must be fond of bad 
weather." 



CHAPTER IV 

I GO TO JAPAN 

The Admiral's prognostications were correct. We met 
such heavy seas passing Cape Flattery that the ship seemed 
to be trying to turn turtle. We were unable to sit on deck 
from that day until the day that we sighted Japan, and once 
we had to heave-to for eighteen hours. The worst of the 
weather being so terrible was that the Captain was unable 
to execute the Company's instructions to take us to see the 
Aleutian Islands, which only whalers know, and drop some 
stores there for shipwrecked mariners. 

But on that December morning, when we found ourselves 
in smooth water and soft, summery temperature off the 
flat-topped hills of Japan, surrounded by the billowing sails 
of countless junks, the very first vessels we had seen since 
Cape Flattery faded out of sight, we felt rewarded. 

The East, the Far East, which I had heard " a-calling " 
all my life, was right within my grasp. In a few hours' 
time I should be standing on the shores of fanciful and 
mysterious Japan, able to remain there as long as I chose, 
for we had no fixed plans. We were just drifting on — drifting 
through our lives — drifting across the world. My heart 
beat high; I might have written nothing but a few books 
of verse which hardly anybody read, but, at any rate, I had 
gone half round the world, and if I wished to stay and 
dream for the rest of my life in the East, who was to say 
me nay? 

Whatever the causes, the effect was to give me the subject 
for which I had been waiting to make my position as an 
author. From the day that I published The Jays at Home, 
I shed my label of the " Australian Poet," and became 
known as the author who has been to Japan. 

36 



36 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

I even enriched the English language with a word — Japs. 
It had long been in use in America, but no one had ventured 
to put it into a book in England. Some thought it was 
undignified; some thought that it would incense the 
Japanese. I not only put it into a book, but on the cover of 
a book, which has sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. 
Only to-day I discovered that Japan's great poet, Yone 
Noguchi, and the Japanese publicist, T. G. Komai, use it in 
their books, which are written in English. 

I had, in Montreal, bought a No. 1 Kodak — a novelty 
in those days — and with it I took several hundred photo- 
graphs in Japan — it was from these that Fenn, the artist, 
of McClure's Syndicate, afterwards drew his illustrations 
for my articles, which were reproduced in the earlier editions 
of the book. The " Kodaks " not only served as the basis 
of the illustrations, they made a most admirable journal 
for me to write from. 

I commenced Kodaking and taking notes from the hour 
that we entered the harbour of Yokohama, and kept it up 
without flagging till the day that we left Yokohama for 
San Francisco. It was to those snapshots with camera and 
pencil that my books on Japan owed the lively touches 
which gave them their popularity. 

We were a winter and a spring and a summer in Japan — for 
all except six weeks which we spent in China. I paid most 
of my hotel bills in Japan by writing my Handbook to Japan 
for the Club Hotel Company. 

In Japan we spent our entire days in sight-seeing. If we 
were not going over interesting buildings (and I over Yoshi- 
waras), temples, castles, baths or tea-houses in marvellous 
gardens — we were wandering about the streets or the country 
in our rikishas, dismounting when there was anything to 
photograph or examine or purchase. The rikisha is a most 
convenient way of getting about for a person who is making 
notes, because he can write as he goes along, and pull up 
as often as he likes when there is anything which needs 
his attention. Also, your Jinrikisha boy, if you choose 
carefully, speaks enough English to act as an interpreter, 
and, from having taken foreigners to the sights so often, is 



I GO TO JAPAN 37 

usually a tolerably efficient guide. Besides which, it is a 
novel, pleasant and exciting method of locomotion. 

We hired the best two rikisha men we could hear of by 
the week, and never regretted the extravagance. They were 
always there when we wanted them, and in a very few days 
grasped exactly what we wished to do and see. One was 
called Sada and the other Taro. 

It was in this way that I acquired my knowledge of the 
Japan which can be seen on the surface, and which is all 
that the average foreigner wishes to see, and gave myself 
one of the three or four subjects with which my name is 
identified. 

We spent the first month in Yokohama, a much-maligned 
place, for it had in those days an unspoiled native town at 
the back of the settlement, and its environs were charming, 
whether one went towards Negishi or towards Ikegami : 
I found enough to keep me hard at work for a month. 

On the last day of the year we went to Tokyo. We had 
a reason for that; we wished to see the great fair in the 
Ginza, which is one of the most typical sights of Japan. 
Savage Landor, who had been in Tokyo for some time, 
wrote that we must on no account miss it, and he took 
rooms for us in the Tokyo hotel — which the Japanese called 
Yadoya, "the hotel." 

The Tokyo hotel was an experience : it had originally 
been the YashiJci or town-house of a feudal prince, in the 
days when the Shogun reigned at Tokyo. It had a moat 
(into which Miss Lorimer, who accompanied us on all our 
travels, fell on the first night we were there, but which 
fortunately contained more mud than water), and stood in an 
angle of the outer works of the castle. 

Just below it, small craft made a port of the outer moat 
of the castle : in its courtyard carpenters were using up 
the large amount of waste space which there is in a Yashiki 
by nailing fresh rooms on to the Daimio's house, to make 
the hotel larger. It could not be called anything but nailing 
on, because it was made of wood and paper, and was not 
properly dovetailed into the existing building, but simply 
tacked on. We learnt many upside-down notions by watch- 



38 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

ing the builders and carpenters, who did most things inside- 
out or upside-down, according to our notions. Also the 
Japanese manager, the Abe San who was murdered a few 
months ago, borrowed my clothes to have them copied by 
a Japanese tailor, and the waiters wore their European 
clothes over their native dress, and wriggled out of them 
behind a screen as soon as a meal was over. If you called 
them at such a moment, whatever your sex, they might come 
forward with their trousers half on and half off. The Japanese 
have their own ideas of conventions between the sexes. 

Wandering through that fair at the Ginza took one into 
the very heart of Japan : it is held to enable people to 
settle their debts before New Year's Day. 

Apart from the obituary parks of Shiba and Ueno, Tokyo 
is not reckoned rich in temples, though it has a few very 
famous temples in the suburbs, and more than a few within 
a short excursionary distance. But Shiba and Ueno — and 
especially the former — present an epitome of Japanese life, 
art, scenery and history. 

It is difficult to imagine anything more beautiful than 
Shiba, though the Japanese have a proverb that you must 
not call anything beautiful till you have seen Nikko. The 
fir woods in which it stands are on a low ridge commanding 
an exquisitive view of the Gulf of Tokyo, and in this wood 
are embosomed the mausolea of most of the earlier Shoguns 
of the Tokugawa House, which came to an end this winter 
with the death of the abdicated Shogun. Each mausoleum 
has a beautiful temple beside the tomb. The presence of so 
many temples has led the Japanese to exhaust their land- 
scape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and crypto- 
meria. Such natives as do not go there for religion are 
attracted by the pleasure city, with its famous tea-houses, 
like the Maple Club, its shows, and, above all, by its dancing. 
Here you may see the iVo-dance, the Kagura-dance, and some 
of the best Geishas. 

But the chief charm of Shiba to me was its absolute 
Orientalness compared to the rest of Tokyo. 

No sooner are you inside the great red gateway of the 
temples than you are in the world of fairy-tales. For temple 



I GO TO JAPAN 39 

after temple opens up before you, low fantastic structures, 
on which Oriental imagination has run riot in colour and form. 
You are bewildered by the innumerable courtyards of stone 
lanterns, the paraphernalia of drum-tower and bell-tower, 
fountain and dancing-stage, which surround them. You 
are sobered by the dark groves between the temples, which 
contain the tombs. 

Temple and tomb are thronged by streams of dignified 
natives, some come to worship and some to see the sights. 
Here you will find a service going on, with white-robed 
priests kneeling on the mirrored floor of black lacquer, for 
which you have to remove your boots. Outside the actual 
temples the shows are in full blast, and picnicking proceeds 
everywhere. All the Japanese are in their native dress. 
Gay little musumes and gorgeous geishas flutter before you. 
The grand tea-houses offer fresh visions of the Orient with 
their Geisha dances and their fantastic gardens. 

Ueno has the added charm of a large lake, covered with 
lotus-blossoms in summer. 

At no great distance from Shiba is the Shinagawa Yoshi- 
wara, which, for fantastic beauty, surpasses anything in 
Japan. With these and the water life of the Nihombashi, 
and the life of the poor going on all day in the streets — for 
the poor Japanese takes the front off his house all through 
the day to air it — I should have found good occupation for 
my notebook and camera for years. 

If we had not been urged by other foreigners, I do not 
know when we should have left Tokyo. And we saw little 
enough of them except at meal-times, or when we went to 
the Frasers (Hugh Fraser was British Minister of Tokyo, 
and husband of the well-known author, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, 
Marion Crawford's sister), or the Napiers. The Master of 
Napier, the Lord Napier and Ettrick, just dead, was his 
First Secretary. But at meal-times they talked so much of 
Easter at Miyanoshita, and the cherry-blossom festival at 
Kyoto, and the annual festival at Nikko, and the Great 
Buddha at Kamakura, and the sacred shrines of Ise, that we 
fortunately felt obliged to visit them. 

Miyanoshita, the favourite holiday-resort of the Europeans 



40 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

in Japan, is high up in the mountains. The valley on the 
right of the long ridge which leads up to it in spring is ablaze 
with azaleas and flowering trees. It, itself, is perched on a 
mountain-side, above a densely-wooded valley. Exquisite 
walks can be taken from it, such as the trip to Hakone, the 
beautiful village which stands on the blue lake at the foot 
of Fujiyama, in which the immortal grace of the great 
mountain is reflected whenever the sun or moon is above 
the horizon. Miyanoshita is equally famous for its mountain 
air and its mountain baths. The boiling water, highly 
impregnated with sulphur, is brought down in bamboo pipes 
from the bosom of the mountain to deep wooden baths sunk 
in the floor of the hotel bathing-house. Life here is one 
long picnic : the energetic take walks, the lazy are carried 
in chairs over the hills : people fly here for week-ends in 
spring, and from the heat and damp of the summer. 

Its great rival is Nikko, another mountain village, em- 
bosomed in shady groves, with woods full of wild hydrangeas. 
In June Nikko is crowded for the festival of Toshogu, the 
deified founder of the dynasty of Shoguns, which was ended 
by the revolution of 1868 — the principal festival of Japan, 
inaugurated with the grandest procession to be seen nowa- 
days, in which all who take part in it wear the ceremonial 
dresses of three hundred years ago. 

Nikko has the two most beautiful temples in the magic 
land— those of lyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa 
dynasty, and his grandson, lyemitsu. Here you see the 
most perfect lacquer and carving in all Japan. And their 
courtyards are exquisitely terraced on the mountain-side. 
Here, too, besides these and other glorious temples, there 
are the added charms of scenery, a foaming sky-blue river, 
running beneath the sacred scarlet bridge, and between the 
avenue of Buddhas, commons of scarlet azalea, and thickets 
of wild wistaria. 

Having seen Nikko, the sacred city of the Shoguns, one 
must needs see Kyoto, the city of the Mikados, and Nara. 

For seven centuries prior to the revolution in our own 
day, Kyoto was the capital of the Mikados. Here they lived 
like gods behind a veil, only penetrated by the hierarchy : 



I GO TO JAPAN 41 

they never left the palace gates except in a closed palanquin : 
they added little but tombs to the city, and their tombs 
were never shown. But the Shoguns, who ruled in their 
name, and others great in the land, adorned Kyoto with some 
of the greatest and most interesting temples in Japan, 
such as the temples of the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the 
two Hongwanji temples, the temple of the Thirty-Three 
Thousand Images, and the chief temple of Inari the Goddess 
of Rice. And it being the ancient capital, we found the city 
full of old prints and curios, and the old-fashioned pleasure 
resorts of Japan. 

Kyoto was a city of the pleasure-seeker of old time, as 
capitals are wont to be. It has wonderful tea-houses in the 
city ; its temple grounds are like permanent fairs ; and within 
a rikisha drive is Lake Biwa, one of the most exquisite lakes 
in the world, whose shores exhibit the chefs d'oeuvres of 
the Japanese landscape-creator. Nothing could be more 
exquisite than the temple grounds on the shores of Lake 
Biwa. 

Of the many old-time festivals of Kyoto, the most famous 
survival is the Miyako-odori, or cherry-blossom festival, 
held every year, when visitors flock to Kyoto to see the 
cherry-groves in full blossom. The feature of the festival 
is a wonderful ballet, for which the best dancers in Japan 
gather in Kyoto. Even the Duke and Duchess of Connaught 
came to Kyoto for it, when they were in Japan. We stayed 
for a long time at Yaami's when they were there, and when 
the Duke learned from Colonel Cavaye, his private secretary, 
that I was a journalist, he gave me permission to accompany 
his party to any function or expedition which I wished to 
describe. The most interesting of them was the shooting 
of the rapids of the Katsuragawa, some miles from Kyoto, 
where thirteen miles of cataracts are negotiated in huge 
punts, built of springy boards. As we were buffeting down 
the rapids, the Duke told me that our present King, then 
Prince George of Wales, had said that shooting those rapids, 
and the baths of Miyanoshita, where you have natural hot 
water in wooden boxes sunk in the floor, were the two best 
things in the world. 



42 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

In Kyoto, an antique city on a broad plain, embosomed in 
hills, capped by temples, one has the very essence of old 
Japan. We stayed there a long time, absorbing an atmo- 
sphere which may soon pass away, never to return. 

Within a day's rikisha drive of Kyoto is Nara, with its 
thousand-year-old treasury of the most notable possessions 
of the Mikados, and its glorious temples, and its sacred 
deer-park, and its acres of scarlet azalea thickets. 

We visited all; we visited the two great cities of Osaka 
and Nagoya, with their magnificent castles, and Kamakura, 
with its gigantic Buddha and its ancient monasteries. We 
visited all the most famous cities and points of scenery 
in Japan ; and the pleasure of our visit was heightened by 
our going away to China for six weeks in the middle of it, 
because when we came back our eyes were far keener to 
observe and to appreciate, while we had the knowledge 
acquired in our former visit to guide us. 

We were truly sorry to leave Japan. I should be quite 
content to be living there still ; but if we had remained there, 
Japan would not have taken its part in my development as 
a writer, for though I should doubtless have compiled a book 
or books about Japan, they would have been sent home as 
the productions of an amateur, and very likely have had 
such difficulty in finding a publisher that they would have 
been brought out in some hole-and-corner way, instead of 
my selling The Japs at Home in the open market, and thereby 
laying the foundation of my career as a travel-book writer. 

Japan supplied me with the material for several books, 
not counting the handbook which I wrote for the Club 
Hotel — A Japanese Marriage, next in point of sales to The 
Japs at Home ; Queer Things About Japan, which sold best 
of all my books in guinea form; More Queer Things About 
Japan, which I wrote with Norma Lorimer ; When We Were 
Lovers in Japan, a novel which was originally published under 
the title of Playing the Game ; and Pictures of Japan ; while 
I have written countless articles and short stories about the 
country. 

I had almost forgotten that I had a book — my Lester the 
Loyalist — published in Japan. Though it only contained 



I GO TO JAPAN 43 

about twenty pages, it took two months to print. How the 
result gratified me, I wrote in The Japs at Home. 

" I forgot all the delays when I saw the printed pages, 
they were so beautiful, and really, considering that Mr. 
Mayeda was the only man in the establishment who could 
read a word of English, the printing was exceedingly correct. 
The blocks had turned out a complete success, though, of 
course, the proofs of the covers did not look as well as they 
would when mounted and creped. 

" The Japanese have a process by which they can make 
paper crepe book-covers as stiff as buckram. 

" ' Well, Mr. Mayeda, how did your little boy like the 
stamp-book you mended up for him so beautifully ? ' I 
asked one day. 

"'Ah! it is very sad; he has gone to hell. But the 
little boy, he has loved the stamp-book so that he has taken 
it to hell with him. It is on his grave, do you call it ? ' 

" Mr. Mayeda was thinking of what the missionaries had 
told him when he was learning English. 

" A few weeks more passed. Mr. Mayeda brought us the 
perfect book. He was so flushed and tearful that I poured 
him a couple of bumpers of vermouth, which he drank off 
with the excitement of an unemployed workman in England 
when he makes a trifle by chance, and spends it right off 
on his beloved gin. 

" ' Is anything the matter, Mr. Mayeda? ' I asked. 

"' It is so sad. My other little boy has gone to hell, too. 
And I am so poor, and I have to keep my wife's uncle, and 
my father is very silly, and so I get drunk every night.' 

" The books he had brought were exquisite. The printing 
was really very correct, and the effect of the long hexameter 
lines, in the handsome small pica type, on the oblong Japanese 
double leaf of silky ivory-tinted paper, every page flowered 
with maple-leaves in delicate pearl-grey under the type, 
was as lovely as it was unique. 

" The block printings on every single leaf were done by 
hand — the leaf being laid over the block, and rubbed into 
it by a queer palm-leaf-pad burnisher. 

" The covers were marvels of beauty, made of steel-grey 



44 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

paper crepe, ornamented, the back one with three Httle 
sere and curled-up maple leaves drifting before the wind, 
and the front one with a spray of maple leaves in all their 
autumn glory and variety of tints, reproduced to the life. 

" Across the right-hand end of the sprig was pasted a long 
white silk label in the Japanese style. The good taste, the 
elegance, the colours of this cover, fairly amazed me." 

Our visit to China was taken at the instigation of friends 
in Japan, who made an annual trip to the Hong Kong races. 
I cannot say that it interested me as much as Japan; but 
we only had time to visit Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton and 
Macao, and of these, Canton alone was absolutely Chinese. 
Canton is as typical a Chinese city as one could desire — 
supreme in commerce, a hot-bed of Chinese aspirations. 
But it is very poorly off for fine old buildings; it is more 
interesting for its huge water population, living in long 
streets of boats, and for the wonderful gardens of some of 
its merchants. 

Macao is chiefly interesting as a very ancient outpost of 
Europe in the East, old enough for Camocns to have lived 
and written his immortal Lusiad there in the sixteenth 
century. It has little to call for the attention of the stranger, 
except nice old gardens with huge banyan-trees, and gambling 
hells, where you learn to ])lay Fan-tan. It only flourishes 
as an Alsatia for rogues outside of British and Chinese 
jurisdiction. 

Shanghai is a fine European town, with luxuries and 
conveniences, for which Hong-Kongers sigh, and a most 
picturesque walled native town, which contains one of the 
most beautiful tea-houses in the East. 

Hong Kong is a gay city, because it is so full of British 
naval and military officers. It is also rather a beautiful 
place, having a mountain right over the town, which is the 
sanatorium and summer-resort. I met many old school- 
fellows there, who took care that invitations should be sent 
to us for all the Service festivities, which are so thick at 
Race-time. And they also told me what to see in Hong 
Kong and Canton and Macao. 

But, knowing that I was only to be in China for a month 



I GO TO JAPAN 45 

and a half, I made no effort to ground myself in knowledge 
of everyday China, but gave myself up to enjoying the gaieties 
and tropical luxuries. 

China thus had no effect on my literary development. 
Our stay there was a mere holiday, at which I had a fresh 
and exhaustive round of military and naval festivities. 

The island of Hong Kong is not a good place for studying 
the Chinaman, except as an employe of the Englishman. 

On our return from China to Japan we were fascinated by 
the almost tropical beauty of the Japanese summer. There 
was also a good deal of British gaiety, for the Fleet had moved 
just before us from China to Japan. 



CHAPTER V 

BACK TO CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES 

The Pacific as we crossed it on our return from Japan 
to America was very different to the Pacific of our outward 
journey. Instead of being on a small ship, so buffeted by 
the seas that we could not remain on deck, with hardly 
another white passenger on board except missionaries, we 
were on a large ship — the finest which crossed the Pacific 
in those days — full of " Society " people returning from the 
East, and the sea was like the traditional mill-pond. 

We landed at San Francisco and stayed a week at the 
Palace to see something of life in the Californian capital. 
It struck me as very like life in Australia, especially in the 
character of the buildings and the appearance of the people. 
But the cold winds of the San Francisco summer have no 
parallel in Australia. 

The chief effect of my visit to California in the develop- 
ment of my writing was that, receiving a contract to write 
a number of articles for the San Francisco Chronicle, my first 
prose writing had to be lively enough to satisfy the lively 
Californian audience. This was a good training. 

From San Francisco we went up the Pacific coast to 
Vancouver, with good opportunities for learning the humours 
and vulgarities of Western America. 

The tail-end of summer and the autumn we spent in 
working our way back from Vancouver to Montreal, breaking 
our journey wherever we felt inclined to try the joys of 
wild life in Canada — at the head waters of the Eraser, the 
Sicamous lakes in the Kootenay country, various spots on 
Lake Nepigon and the wild North shore of Lake Superior, 
Lake Nipissing, the Lake of the Woods, Trout Lake, and so 
on, besides the chief towns like Winnipeg, and the regular 



BACK TO CANADA AND THE STATES 47 

tourist stopping-places at Banff and the Glacier House. At 
some places we had the opportunity of watching the life of 
the Siwashes, or Coast Indians, of Esquimaux blood, who 
live chiefly by catching and drying the salmon which we 
saw coming up the Fraser like a river of fish in a river of 
water. At others we saw the lordly Red Indian — Stony or 
Blood or Blackfoot— and on the Rainy Lake we saw two 
thousand O jib ways on the war-path — all cartridge-belts and 
feathers — camped on the outskirts of a Canadian town 
(without inflicting the smallest scare on the inhabitants), 
while they were waiting to see if they should have to 
go and support the O jib ways across the border in their 
war upon a Baltimore Company, which had infringed their 
rights. 

The Indians, in their shrewd way, first tried their luck in 
the United States Courts, who decided in their favour, so war 
was not declared. 

At Sicamous we saw eighty fresh skins of black bears, who 
had been slaughtered while they were feeding on the salmon 
stranded in shallow water, owing to the failure of the berry 
crop. In their anxiety to spawn in shallow water, the salmon 
crush their way up into tiny brooks and ponds where the 
bears can catch them easily, and the farmers sweep them out 
of the water with branches. 

At the Glacier House, Jim the guide's slaying of the great 
grizzly bear, when we were there before, inflamed my imagina- 
tion. I cultivated Jim. I climbed the great Assulkan 
Glacier with him after the first fall of autumn snow, and 
made a vow about glaciers which I have religiously kept; 
and having a Winchester sporting rifle with me, I went out 
with him to try and get a shot at a grizzly, whose track he 
had seen. But we saw no more of that bear, which was, 
perhaps, fortunate for me, for though I had won many 
prizes at rifle-shooting, I had not been brought face to face 
with any dangerous game, and a grizzly decidedly falls into 
that category. 

We had splendid fishing all the way across, and delightful 
camping out; and altogether had an experience of outdoor 
life in Western Canada, which is very unspoiled and wild — 



48 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

a snakeless Eden, that certainly told in my development as a 
writer. 

At last the autumn came to an end. We felt the first 
breath of winter standing by the river side, where Tom Moore 
wrote his famous Canadian Boat Song — the woods were a 
glory of crimson and gold. 

We said good-bye to Canada and turned our footsteps 
to New York. There we met a warm-hearted American 
welcome. Our numerous friends seemed to find an almost 
personal gratification in the fact that we had been to the 
Far North West and to the Far East, to the Pacific Coast 
and to Japan and China. 

I was now no longer exclusively the " Australian Poet," 
I was a sort of mild explorer, and people talked Japan to 
me whenever they were not talking about themselves. 
There was a good deal of this to do, because I had a 
commission from Griffith, Farran & Co. to compile a book 
on the younger American Poets, and nearly every one I 
met seemed to be a poet. 

I was sitting next to H. M. Alden, the editor of Harper's 
Magazine, one night at dinner. Suddenly he pulled out his 
watch. " It is now nine o'clock," he said ; "at this moment 
there are a hundred thousand people in America writing 
poetry, and most of them will send it to me." 

One of them was the English curate of the most fashionable 
church in New York, and he was in a quandary. He wished 
to be in the book, but he had heard that there was to be a 
biography of each poet, giving his date of birth, parentage, 
career, etc. He did not wish his date of birth to be known — 
he thought that it would interfere with his prospects as a 
lady-killer. " Was it compulsory for him to say how old 
he was ? " he whined. 

" You need not tell the truth about it," I suggested. 

In the compilation of that book I saw a great deal of human 
nature, because I met the poets, whereas in Australian Poets, 
which I edited simultaneously, I had to do my work entirely 
by correspondence. 

We spent a delightful winter and spring in New York, 
because we had Miss Lorimer's beautiful sister, Mrs. Hay- 



BACK TO CANADA AND THE STATES 49 

Chapman, one of the finest amateur pianists I ever heard, 
staying with us all the time, so that we had a feast of music, 
and as I was doing literary and dramatic criticisms for the 
Dominion Illustrated, the leading weekly of Canada, we had 
plenty of new books and theatre tickets. This, and the 
articles on Japan I was writing for the American Press and 
McClure's Syndicate, kept me quite busy. 

My sojourn in America had a most important influence 
on my literary career, because it taught me my trade as a 
journalist. Needing money, and having no connections, I 
had to make my way as a journalistic free lance in the open 
market, and I succeeded in making a fair income out of it. 

But I never tried to get a publisher (though one came to 
me), for the simple reason that I never contemplated entering 
the lists as a prose-writer. A large and well-known firm 
bought editions in sheets of my various volumes of verse, 
which surprised me very much, till they went bankrupt 
shortly afterwards without paying for them. The pur- 
chase was not of sufficient magnitude to be the cause of the 
bankruptcy, as the ill-natured might suggest. 

I have often regretted that I did not form a close personal 
connection with a single publishing house over there, instead 
of having each individual book, as it was ready, sold to which- 
ever publisher the agent happens to do business with. 

Also I blame myself for not learning the art of pleasing 
the American novel-reader. Their book market is a much 
more valuable one than ours, and unfortunately the worst 
fault a novel can have in their eyes is its being " too British." 
A book like The Tragedy of the Pyramids is anathema to 
them. 

The only prose book I published during my sojourn in 
America was The Art of Travel, for which the publisher, a 
Greek, forgot to pay me a single penny of what he con- 
tracted. I afterwards turned into it an advertisement for 
the North German Lloyd, and got something, about fifty 
pounds, I think, out of them. 

I must not take leave of America without recording my 
impressions of the other American cities which I visited 
besides New York and Boston. 



50 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma and other western towns 
were spoiled for me, because the working-classes in them 
were so " swollen-headed " and rude that any educated or 
gently-born person felt like a victim of the French Revolution 
as he was making his way to the scaffold, surrounded by wild 
mobs thirsting for his blood. The lower classes in the cities 
of the Pacific Coast insult you to show that they are your 
equals. And except as manual labourers, they never could 
be anybody's equals, because God created them so common. 
It is these people and the unscrupulous speculators who 
make money. The decent people get ground between the 
upper and lower grindstone in a land where living costs out 
of all proportion to the rewards of education. 

We spent some time also in Washington, which is their 
exact converse. Washington has its vulgar rich, who go 
there to make a " season " of it, and its venal and lobbying 
politicians who make the vast temple, which acts as the 
American Capitol, a den of thieves, but they do not take the 
first place in the public eye. The really fine elements in 
the American nation are well represented at Washington, 
and form a natural Court, in which the President may or 
may not be prominent. That depends on whether he is 
fit to be their leader. It is they, and not the President, who 
keep up the traditions of their country before the eyes of 
the various Embassies. Such a man was Colonel John Hay. 
Their presence helps to make Washington a delightful city. 

The American Government is extremely polite and hospit- 
able to visiting authors. I was such a small author in those 
days that I felt positively embarrassed when, a few hours 
after our arrival in Washington, President Cleveland's 
private secretary. Colonel Dan Lamont, called with an 
invitation for us to go to supper with the President and 
Mrs. Cleveland and be present at the last reception they gave 
before they left the White House. 

And when President Harrison came into office, Mr. Blaine, 
the new Secretary of State, invited us to share his private 
box to witness the inaugural procession. 

These were civilities beyond one's dreams, and added to 
them were the never-ceasing hospitalities at houses like John 




ISRAEL ZANGWILL 

Drawn by Yoshio Markino 



BACK TO CANADA AND THE STATES 51 

Hay's, and the Judges', and the deUghtful receptions at which 
one met the great scientists connected with the Smithsonian 
Institute, and the chief authors and editors congregated at 
Washington. 

To witness a change of Administration at Washington and 
partake in its hospitahties is extraordinarily stimulating and 
interesting. It was a privilege far beyond my deserts to 
meet the great public men of America. 



CHAPTER VI 

LITERARY AT-HOMES AND LITERARY CLUBS 

The literary at-home is an American institution. It 
may not have been invented there, but it has certainly 
flowered there. I did not visualise the literary at-home 
at all until I attended the Sunday evenings of my dear old 
friend, Louise Chandler Moulton, the author of Swallow 
Flights, at Boston. Her house was the centre of literary 
society there. She knew every one who was worth knowing 
in literary circles in England and America, and she had a 
passion for collecting them on Sunday nights. 

There I learnt the essential simplicity and common- 
sensibleness of American entertainments. No one went 
for the refreshments; there were none except coffee and 
various kinds of cakes. It was, in fact, afternoon tea, 
with coffee instead of the drink which cheers without in- 
ebriating, held at 9 p.m. instead of 5. Her evenings were 
crowded. 

When I went to New York I found the New York literary 
people collected every Sunday night in the hospitable home 
of Edmund Clarence Stedman, the chief literary biographer 
of his day. Laurence Hutton, too, the author of Literary 
Landmarks in London, and editor of certain pages of Harper's 
Magazine, had a few people on Sunday nights. There was 
always the same simplicity about eating and drinking, and 
the same absence of any entertainment, except being intro- 
duced to American celebrities, or occasionally listening 
spellbound while one of them told a humorous story in the 
inimitable American way. 

Charles de Kay, the chief art critic in New York of that 
day, was one of the few people who gave big afternoon teas 
in the English style. De Kay belonged to one of the oldest 



LITERARY AT-HOMES AND CLUBS 53 

literary families in New York, for he was the grandson of 
Joseph Rodman Drake. 

These were the private literary at-homes. They 
yielded in importance to the storytellers' nights of the 
various clubs, generally Saturday nights. Sometimes there 
was a large house dinner at the Club, sometimes nothing 
happened until the reception began, about nine, but in any 
case, the procedure was the same. First of all, the most 
brilliant men of the day told anecdotes, and then the assem- 
blage broke up into small groups, when the introduction of 
strangers to each other was the feature of the evening. It 
was in this way that I came to know nearly every important 
American writer of that day. Sometimes two good anecdote- 
tellers would be put up to banter each other, and the en- 
counters would be very witty. I remember one encounter 
in particular between a Bostonian and a professor of the 
University of Chicago. The professor alluded most feelingly 
to" the departed glories of Boston — Boston which considered 
itself the hub of the universe — and dilated upon the new era 
which was dawning for Chicago. The Bostonian got up and 
agreed with every word he said. 

" I am surprised at my friend's agreeing with this," said 
the professor. 

" Not at all," said the Bostonian. " I speak as one of the 
owners of Chicago." 

The audience rocked with laughter, recalling the fact that 
this Bostonian had turned a respectable fortune into millions 
by buying up a large area in Chicago when it was ruined by 
the great fire. 

At another such evening Mark Twain said the circumstance 
which gave him the greatest satisfaction in his life was the 
fact that Darwin, for a year before his death, read nothing 
but his works. Darwin's doctors, he added, had warned him 
that he would get softening of the brain if he read anything 
but absolute drivel. 

Sometimes there were discussions at these evenings, and 
one of them was about the merits of a certain Society poetess, 
whose poems enjoyed an unbounded sale without meeting 
with the approbation of the critics, " Do you not admit," 



54 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

asked one of the lady's admirers of the editor of the Century 
Magazine, " that Miss Van is the poetess of passion? " 

" Yes," said the editor, " Miss Van is the poetess of 

passion — of boarding-house passion." 

I never came away from one of these evenings without 
feehng that I had been partaking of intellectual champagne. 

When I was in America Eugene Field edited one of the 
great Chicago dailies, and was the principal author of the 
West. My first meeting with him was a characteristic one. 
I was at an at-home in New York, talking to the editress 
of a fashion paper, who had also written books of twaddly 
gush about travel. The hostess brought up Field, and 
introduced him to the editress. 

" Very glad to meet you, ma'am," he said. " I think I 
may say that I have read all your books with the greatest 
interest." 

" Are you a writer, Mr. Field? " she asked. " I am sorry 
to say that I have never heard of you." 

" Nor I you, ma'am ; but you might have pretended, same 
as I did." 

There used to be very large at-homes every Sunday 
night at the flat of a wealthy old lady who owned an im- 
portant newspaper. Her guests were mostly authors and 
artists, and she hardly knew any of them by sight, and never 
gave any of them commissions to work for her paper. Some- 
times she did not even put in an appearance at her at- 
homes, which went on just the same, as if she had been 
there. Her guests came to meet each other, not her. She 
was not at all literary; her only ambition was like Queen 
Elizabeth's — to be taken for a young and beautiful woman. 
She was no longer either, but she dressed the part. Young 
America used openly to make fun of her weakness on these 
occasions, and I well remember the editor of Puck (a New 
York comic paper), to whom she was showing a beautiful 
copy of Canova's nude statue of Napoleon's sister, Pauline 
Borghese, gravely pretending that he thought it was a statue 
of herself, and complimenting her on the likeness which the 
sculptor had achieved. His impudence carried him through ; 
his delighted hostess believed that he believed it, and ex- 



LITERARY AT-HOMES AND CLUBS 55 

plained, with genuine colour coming into her rouged cheeks, 
that in spite of the likeness, it was not her, but " Princess 
Pauline." 

As the refreshments at this house were on a very liberal 
scale, it was a good place to meet the section of the Press 
which is not satisfied with a mere feast of reason and flow 
of soul. One also met fame-hunters, like the sculptor whom 
I will call Vermont, who came to cultivate the Press. I was 
introduced to him at this house, and I hoped that I should 
never see him again, because he was such a colossal egotist. 
One day, a few years afterwards, to my dismay, I met him 
in Fleet Street. I said, " How do you do, Mr. Vermont? " 

He said at once, " Can you do something for me? " which 
was his invariable habit. 

I said " yes " cheerfully, meaning to wriggle out of it, for 
I did not want to do it. I was under no obligation to him, 
because I had been careful not to give him the opportunity 
of offering me any hospitalities while I was over there. He 
said, " I have never been in England before. Can you tell 
me if I ought to use a letter- writer ? " 

I said, "I think so; what is it — a new kind of type- 
writer? " 

He said, " No, it is a book which tells you the proper ways 
for writing letters." 

Remembering that the last letter I had received from him 
began, " Mr. Douglas Sladen, Esq., Dear Sir," I said I thought 
he ought, and as we were in Fleet Street, recommended him 
to go to Hatchard's in Piccadilly. I was interested to know 
the kind of impression he would make on Arthur Humphreys, 
to whom I sent him with my card. I carefully gave him a 
card without an address in the hope that I should not see 
him any more. But he got my address from Humphreys, 
and came to see me the next day. It appeared that he had 
brought a large group of statuary with him, which he wished 
to present to the City of London. Could I help him in this ? 
he wished to know. I said yes. I gave him an introduction 
to the Lord Mayor, and to the editor of the Illustrated London 
News, to both of whom I was a total stranger. He went 
away very pleased with himself. The next time I met him 



56 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

was at the Lord Mayor's Day banquet at the Mansion House. 
I asked him how he had got on, and he said that he owed 
more to me than any one he had ever met. The Lord Mayor 
had accepted the sculpture, and given orders for it to be 
erected somewhere in the Guildhall Library until its final 
position could be decided on, and the editor of the Illustrated 
London News was going to give the front page of his next 
number to a reproduction of the immortal work. After this 
I met him at every important function to which I received 
an invitation. 



CHAPTER VII 

WE START OUR LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 

I WAS well known at authors' clubs and authors' receptions 
long before I was known as an author. In fact, I doubt if 
many of those who swarmed to our at-homes ever thought 
of me seriously as an author, or even realised that I wrote. 
They knew of me as the friend of authors, artists, and actors, 
and people who were merely charming, and well enough off 
to entertain, and enjoyed meeting the celebrities of Bohemia. 
They credited me with a certain capacity as a host, who 
always introduced the right people to each other. 

I had graduated in a good school for entertaining at Boston 
and New York, where the hostess takes care that each of 
her guests before they leave shall have been introduced to 
the persons most 'worth meeting. If Oliver Wendell Holmes 
was in the room at Boston or the American Cambridge, every 
guest was presented to him. At a large literary at-home in 
New York you were sure to have been introduced to a Mark 
Twain, or a Howells, or a Stockton before you left. Americans 
make a point of having a guest of honour at an at-home, and 
I tried to keep this up as a feature of our at-homes at Addison 
Mansions. 

It was some time before we were able to start our Bohemian 
at-homes in London, because when we arrived we had hardly 
a single acquaintance in Bohemia, except Gleeson White, 
and his author, artist and actor friends, like ours, were all 
in America, Like ourselves, he had been three years absent 
from England. 

The hundreds of English and American authors, artists 
and actors who knew us at 32, Addison Mansions will recollect 
chiefly a very narrow hall hung with autographed portraits 
of celebrities, a room whose woodwork and draperies sug- 

57 



58 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

gested one of the old Mameluke houses at Cairo, a room whose 
walls were covered with Japanese curios, and two other 
rooms, one of which was lined to the height of several feet 
from the ground with ingeniously-fitted-in book-cases, and 
the other was a bedroom in disguise. These and a ten by 
seven telephone room, likewise lined with book-shelves, 
which only had enough chairs for a Ute-d-tete, formed the 
suite in which we held the weekly receptions in the American 
style at which so many people, now famous, used to meet 
every Friday night, regaled only with cigarettes, whiskeys-and- 
sodas, claret cup, bottled ale and sandwiches. 

There must have been some attractions about them when 
actors like the Grossmiths, and authors like Anthony Hope, 
and half-a-dozen R.A.s used to find their way out to these 
wilds of West Kensington Friday after Friday towards mid- 
night. Perhaps it was that we never had any entertainment 
when we could help it, and friends were able to make our flat 
a rendezvous where they could be secure of having conversa- 
tions uninterrupted by music, and to which they could bring 
a stranger whom they wished to introduce into Bohemia. 

Occasionally a stranger so introduced, who happened to 
be a famous reciter, felt constrained, as a matter of returning 
hospitality, to insist on reciting for us. But in the main, as 
a large number of our guests were performers, they were glad 
that no performances were allowed, for if they had had to 
listen to other people, they would have felt bound, as a 
matter of professional etiquette, to perform themselves. If 
there are performances and you are a performer, it is a 
reproach not to be asked to perform. 

It was Kernahan who first took us to the Idler Teas. 

With Sir Walter Besant I had been in correspondence 
before I left England, and on my return he wrote asking me 
to join the Authors' Club, with which my name was so 
intimately associated for many years. But I did not meet 
so many Bohemians there as I did at the Idler Teas and the 
dinners of the Vagabonds Club, of which I became a member 
because the circle of brilliant young authors whom Jerome 
and Barr had enlisted for the Idler Magazine were many of 
them " Vagabonds." 



LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 59 

At the Idlers and Vagabonds I met most of the rising 
authors, and when the American rush to London com- 
menced, I took many distinguished Americans to the Idler 
Teas, and to the receptions of people whom we met there. 
In this way we soon had a very large acquaintance in Bohemia, 
eager to meet our American friends, when we commenced 
our at-homes on a modest scale to give our literary acquaint- 
ances from the opposite sides of the Atlantic the opportunity 
of meeting each other. 

I met many authors as well as actors at the Garrick and 
the Savage — in addition to the authors I met at the Authors' 
Club and the Savile, and as I was at that time a member of 
the Arts, and the Hogarth, a very lively place, I met a great 
many artists. Of black-and-white artists, at any rate, who 
patronised the latter, I soon knew quite a number — Phil 
May, Bernard Partridge, Dudley Hardy, Reginald Cleaver, 
Ralph Cleaver, Hal Hurst, Melton Prior, Seppings Wright, 
Holland Tringham, Paxton, James Greig, John Gulich, Louis 
Baumer, F. H. Townsend, Fred Pegram, Chantrey Corbould, 
Frank Richards, Bernard Gribble, Will Rothenstein, Aubrey 
Beardsley, Willson, Starr Wood and Linley Samborne. 

At the same time we saw a good deal of such well-known 
painters as David Murray, R.A. ; Solomon J. Solomon, R.A. ; 
Arthur Hacker, R.A. ; J. J. Shannon, R.A. ; Walter Crane ; 
Llewellyn, the P.R.I. ; Sir James Linton, P.R.I. ; G. A. Storey, 
A.R.A. ; Sir Alfred East, R.A. ; R. W. Allan ; J. H. Lorimer, 
R.S.A. ; J. Lavery ; Herbert Schmalz ; Hugh de Trafford 
Glazebrook ; Yeend King ; William Yeames, R.A., who married 
my cousin, Annie Wynfield; and Alfred Parsons, A.R.A. 

Various ladies' clubs, and clubs to which both sexes were 
admitted, contributed not a little to the extraordinary 
amount of social intercourse which then was a feature of 
Bohemia. The Pioneer Club, the Writers' Club, and the 
Women Journalists' were, frankly, associations of working 
women. And there were many members interested in 
literature in the Albemarle and the Sesame, ladies' clubs which 
admitted men as guests. Once a week at the Writers' Club, 
and very often at the Pioneer, they had large gatherings at 
which literary " shop " filled the air. 



60 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Thus in a short time we came to know hundreds of authors 
and artists (male and female), actors and actresses, and kept 
open house for them every Friday night. 

The Pioneer, the forerunner of the Lyceum, was a great 
institution in those days. Rich women, interested in woman's 
work, established it and bore some of its expense for the 
benefit of women workers. R had a fair sprinkling of well- 
known authoresses, and the prominent women in all sorts of 
movements. Rs afternoon and evening receptions — the 
latter generally for lectures — were most interesting affairs. 
There was no suffragist movement in those days to over- 
shadow everything else. Women's Rights were a joke like 
" bloomers," which are now suggestive of something very 
different. 

The Writers' Club was more frankly literary, more frankly 
" shop." You met non-writing workers too in those base- 
ment premises in Norfolk Street, which have seen the birth 
of so many reputations. I remember meeting there a 
suffragist whose name is known all over the world now, but 
when I was introduced to her it was only known to her fellow- 
workers. She asked me what I thought of the suffragists. 
Not knowing who she was, and not having thought anything 
about them, I replied, " Oh, I've nothing against them 
except their portraits in the halfpenny papers ! " It made 
her my friend, for she had suffered from rapid newspaper 
reproduction that very morning. 

I always enjoyed those gatherings of women workers very 
much, though many of them had ideas for the betterment 
of England which involved the destruction of all I cherished 
most, and some were terrifying in their earnestness like the 
she-Apostle of antivivisection, who had a hydrophobic glitter 
in her eye, which reminded me of a blue-eyed collie I once 
had, but had to give away because it bit. 

This lady was the cause of my gradually dropping away 
from those pleasant receptions. It was no good going to 
them because no sooner had I been introduced to anybody 
interesting, than she came up and wanted me to start enlisting 
them for the cause, though I knew that I should never employ 
an antivivisectionist doctor in the case of a serious illness 



LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 61 

any more than I should employ a homoeopathist. She after- 
wards became an advocatus diaboli — an apologist for the 
outrages of the Militants, which she said were necessary to 
draw attention to the wrongs of women. 

In after days, when I had written a novel which became 
very popular {A Japanese Marriage), I was asked to lecture 
before the Pioneer Club on some subject connected with the 
book. Noticing that their lectures were generally rather of 
an abstract nature, and not having at all an abstract mind 
myself, I chose for my subject, " The Immorality of Self- 
Sacrifice." The book was largely taken up with the un- 
happiness inflicted on the hero and the heroine because she 
was a good churchwoman, and his deceased wife's sister, 
and would not marry him, though she was desperately in 
love with him, until long afterwards she was disgusted with 
the narrow-mindedness of a clergyman cousin. 

I gave that lecture in the innocence of my heart. I 
imagined that the Club would be so anxious to pioneer for 
the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, that I should carry the 
audience with me. I made the mistake of being too abstract. 
If I had contented myself with being " agin' the Govern- 
ment " and delivered a technical diatribe in favour of the 
Bill, ladies with a mission on this particular subject would 
have started up on every side. 

As it was, speaker after speaker found my idea immoral. 
Self-sacrifice was the order of the day; they preached self- 
sacrifice; they plumed themselves upon self-sacrifice. They 
did not approve of me at all. But what I objected to because 
it was self-sacrifice, they objected to because they were 
rebels, so the evening went off very well. 

Bohemian Club evenings in those days differed from those 
of the present day because most of them were confined to 
men. The Playgoers' Club was almost the only one which 
admitted ladies; and at that time it confined them mostly 
to lectures. The ladies' Clubs certainly welcomed men, but 
the serious element was more conspicuous there. The idea 
of having a literary club at which ladies and gentlemen 
constantly dined together for pleasure had not been born. 

The actors and actresses and well-known speakers of our 



62 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

acquaintance we met mostly at the old Playgoers' Club, or 
at Phil May's Sunday nights in the stable which had become 
his studio. 

The old Playgoers' was a most breezy place, where no one 
was allowed to speak for more than a few minutes, unless 
he could bring down the house with his wit. The ordinary 
person making a good sound speech was howled down. The 
chairman sometimes interfered to save a more distinguished 
orator. I remember the chairman of the club saying at one 
of the Christmas dinners to the section in the audience who 
were far enough away from the speaker to be talking quite 
as loud as he was, " Will those bounders at the back of the 
room shut up? " 

The women writers very appropriately established them- 
selves as a Writers' Club in the area flat underneath A. P. 
Watt's literary agency. There was no connection, but I 
suppose it resulted in an illustrious man author occasionally 
coming on from Watt's to have a cup of tea at the Writers' 
Club. They had an at-home every Friday afternoon, which 
was always extremely well supported. 

I enjoyed going to these Writers' Club teas very much, 
and went often, and on one or other occasion met most of the 
leading women workers of the day. 

The Writers' Clubbists did not take women's theories so 
seriously as the Pioneers, perhaps because they were not 
subsidised, and had no fierce patron to keep them at concert 
pitch, but they were more literary, and, until the rise of the 
Women Journalists', had almost the monopoly of working 
women writers. The Sesame had some, and when it was 
founded later on, the Lyceum became a regular haunt of 
them. 

It was only in our last days at Addison Mansions that we 
joined the Dilettanti, a dining club of authors and artists, 
run by Paternoster and his charming wife. It has only a 
few score members, who once a month eat an Italian dinner 
together, washed down by old Chianti, at the Florence 
Restaurant in Soho, and listen to a brilliant paper by one of 
their members, which they afterwards discuss, with a great 
deal of wit and freedom. Henry Baerlein, Mrs. George 



LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 63 

Cran, and Herbert Alexander, are among its wittiest 
members, and Mrs. Adam, daughter of Mrs. C. E. Humphry, 
the ever-popular " Madge," is quite the best serious 
speaker. The speaking is more really impromptu than at 
the Omar Khayyam, for the papers generally have titles which 
do not convey the least inkling of what they are to be about, 
and it is therefore impossible for people to prepare their 
speeches beforehand. 

Literary at-homes were a great feature of that day. There 
was a large set of Literary, Art and Theatrical people who 
used to meet constantly at the houses of Phil May, A. L. 
Baldry, A. S. Boyd, Moncure D. Conway, Gleeson White, 
Dr. Todhunter, William Sharp, Zangwill, Rudolph Lehmann, 
E. J. Horniman, Joseph Hatton, Max O'Rell, John Strange 
Winter, George and Weedon Grossmith, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, 
J. J. Shannon, Mrs. Jopling, and Jerome K. Jerome. And 
the more eminent authors and artists, at any rate, used to 
meet a great deal at Lady St. Helier's, Lady Lindsay's, Lady 
Dorothy Nevill's, the Tennants' and the H. D. Traills'. 

Sometimes they met in the afternoon, and sometimes in 
the evening — more often the latter, because the artists came 
in greater numbers, and the actors, when the Theatres were 
closed. As I have said, there were very seldom performances 
at any of them, because the people met to talk, and be intro- 
duced to fresh celebrities, and whether the reception was in 
the afternoon or the evening, the hospitalities were of the 
simple American kind. They were bona fide meetings of 
clever people who wished to make each other's acquaintance. 
Our friends came to us on Friday nights. At first, like Phil 
May, we kept open house every week, but as the number of 
our friends increased, we gradually tailed off to once a fort- 
night and once a month, because we had almost to empty 
the house out of the windows to make room for all who 
came. 

When we ceased to receive every week, we sent out notices 
to the friends we wanted to see most that we were going to 
be at home on such an evening, and from this we passed to 
giving each at-home in honour of some special person, whom 
our friends were invited to meet. I cannot remember half 



64 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

the special guests they were invited to meet, but among 
them were Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Mark Twain, Mrs. 
Flora Annie Steel, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Maarten 
Maartens, Hall Caine, H. G. Wells, W. W. Jacobs, Sir 
Frederick Lugard (then Captain Lugard) when he came back 
from his great work in Uganda, F. C. Selous when he came 
back from his mighty hunting in South Africa, Zangwill, 
J. J. Shannon, Frankfort Moore, Savage Landor and Dr. 
George Ernest Morrison. 

In a very short time, Bohemian at-homes, at which author 
and artist and actor met, became the rage in the Bohemian 
quarters of London — West Kensington,' Chelsea, Chiswick, 
and the North-west. There were many people who were 
never so happy as when they went to an at-home every after- 
noon and evening of the week. They were all workers, and 
most of them too poor to use cabs much, so one wondered 
when they found time to do their work. That they did it 
was obvious, for most of them were producing a good deal of 
work, and many of them were laying the foundations of not 
inconsiderable fame. 

At some of these receptions they had a little music, but at 
most of them they had no entertainment. For the clever 
people who went to these receptions did not go long distances 
to sit like mutes while some third- or fourth- or fortieth-rate 
artist played or sang; they went to meet other well-known 
Bohemians — well-known men and charming women. The 
most successful hosts were those who asked celebrities and 
pretty people in equal quantities : the celebrities liked 
meeting pretty people, and the pretty people liked meeting 
the celebrities. 

Some celebrities were quite annoyed if there were only 
celebrities to meet them; they wanted an audience. 

I remember Whistler the painter and Oscar Wilde being 
the first two people to arrive at a reception at Mrs. Jopling's 
house in Beaufort Street, where I had been lunching. They 
were intensely annoyed at having only the Joplings and myself 
as audience; it was no good showing off before us, since we 
knew all about them. They were quite distant to each other, 
and more distant to us. But as the time wore on, and nobody 



LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 65 

came, Wilde had time to think of something effective to say — 
he never spoke, if he could help it, unless he thought he could 
be effective. 

" I hear that you went over to the Salon by Dieppe, 
Jimmy," he sneered, "were you economising? " 

" Don't be foolish," said Whistler. " I went to paint." 

" How many pictures did you paint? " asked the aesthete, 
with crushing superiority. 

Whistler did not appear to hear his question. " How many 
hours did it take? " he asked. 

" You went, not I," said Oscar. " No gentleman ever goes 
by the Dieppe route." 

" I do, often," said our charming hostess, who had this 
great house in Chelsea, with an acre or two of garden : "it 
takes five hours." 

" How many minutes are there in an hour, Oscar ? " 
drawled Whistler. 

" I am not quite sure, but I think it's about sixty. I am 
not a mathematician." 

" Then I must have painted three hundred," said the 
unabashed Whistler. 

It was at this at-home later on that Whistler made his 
often-quoted mot — not for the first time, I believe. A pretty 
woman said something clever, and Wilde, who could be a 
courtier, gallantly remarked that he wished he had said it. 

" Never mind, Oscar," said Whistler, who owed him one 
for the gibe about the Dieppe route ; " you will have said it." 

They were really very fine that afternoon, because they 
were so thoroughly disgusted at not having more people to 
show off before; showing off is a weakness of many authors 
and artists and actors, though Bernard Shaw is the only one 
that I remember who has had the frankness to admit it in 
Who's Who. 

We used to begin receiving at nine for the sake of people 
who had trains to catch to distant suburbs — as Jerome 
K. Jerome remarked, " other people always live in such 
out-of-the-way places " — and kept the house open till the 
last person condescended to go away, which was generally 
about three. Any one who had been introduced to us was 

F 



66 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

welcome to come, and to bring any of his friends with him, 
and in this way we met some of the most interesting people 
who came to the flat during our twenty years of tenancy. 
For instance, Herbert Bunning, the composer, whose opera 
La Princesse Osra, presented at Covent Garden, was 
drawn from Anthony Hope's novel by a permission which I 
obtained for him, brought with him one night M. Feuillerat, 
who married Paul Bourget's delightful sister, and Madame 
Feuillerat. M. Feuillerat in his turn brought with him Emile 
Verhaeren, one of the greatest living Belgian poets. M. 
Feuillerat himself was at the time professor of English 
literature in the university at Rennes, and both he and 
Madame Feuillerat spoke admirable English. On another 
Friday they were going to bring Paul Bourget himself, but 
he did not fulfil his intention of coming to England at the 
time. 

Another distinguished foreigner who came about the same 
time was Maarten Maartens, a Dutch country gentleman 
whose real name is Joost Marius Maarten Willem van der 
Poorten-Schwartz. Hearing so much of his beautiful chateau 
in Holland, I asked him how he could tear himself away so 
much as he did. His reply was that for nine months in the 
year the weather in Holland was awful, and for the other 
three generally awful. This great writer had an epigram- 
matic way of expressing himself. He said that an eminent 
critic, who constituted himself his patron when he was in 
England, had warned him not to go to the Authors' Club 
(of which I was the Honorary Secretary), because most of 
the people who went there were very small fry. He said 
that he had taken no notice of the warning because he had 
observed that his informant wore a piece of pink sarcenet 
ribbon for a tie, and that he, Maarten Maartens, knew enough 
of the Englishman's idea of dress to be aware that the critic 
could not be a judge of ties, and wear pink sarcenet ribbon ; 
and he argued that a man so self-satisfied and so ignorant 
about ties might be equally self-satisfied and ignorant 
about Authors' clubs. I asked him if he had written any 
books in Dutch. He said, " No, what is the good, when 
there are so few people to write for ? Only Dutchmen speak 



LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 67 

Dutch. It was a choice of writing in Enghsh or German, 
if I was to have an audience, and I chose Enghsh." 

Georg Brandes, the great Danish critic, who had so much 
to do with the recognition of Ibsen, told me when he came 
to our flat and I asked him a similar question, that in his 
later books he had taken to writing in other languages for the 
same reason. He was extremely interested, I remember, in 
Sergius Stepniak, the exiled Russian revolutionary, as was 
the then permanent head of the Foreign Office, whom I 
approached with some diffidence on the subject when they 
were both dining at a Club dinner of which I had the arrange- 
ments. Stepniak, whom I always found, in my intercourse 
with him, a very amiable man, had all the stage appearance of 
a villain, with his coal-black hair, his knotty, bulbous forehead, 
his black Tartar eyes, black beard and sombre complexion. 

Of Zola, a studious-looking man with a brown beard, a 
rather tilted nose, and pince-nez, I have spoken in another 
chapter. 

Anatole France I never met till quite recently, at a little 
party at John Lane's. He was as abounding in simpatica 
as Zola was wanting in it. He was rather short, and held his 
head sideways like the late Conte de Paris, with his closely- 
cropped beard buried in his chest. But he had unmistak- 
ably the air of a great man, and extraordinarily bright and 
sympathetic eyes — a captivating personality. 

As I began with foreigners I will deal with them before 
passing on to the many interesting Anglo-Saxons who 
assembled in those rooms during those twenty years. 

August Strindberg, the Scandinavian novelist and 
dramatist, was to have come to see us when he was in England 
in the 'nineties. He forwarded an introduction, but did 
not follow it up owing to the distance of his sojourning place. 
Before he left Scandinavia, he had asked a friend who was 
supposed to know all about England for a nice healthy 
suburb of London, far enough out for the air to be pure. 
The friend suggested (without, I think, any idea of practical 
joking) that Gravesend should be the place, and at Gravesend 
Strindberg remained during the whole of his stay in London, 
doubtless composing novels or dramas upon London society. 



68 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Many well-known Frenchmen naturally came to see us, 
like Gabriel Nicolet, the artist, and Eustache de Lorey, who 
had been an attache of the French Legation in Teheran, 
and who afterwards collaborated with me in Queer Things 
about Persia and The Moon of the Fourteenth Night. Since 
his return from Persia he had become eminent as a com- 
poser. He wrote the music of one of the most popular 
songs in Les Merveilleuses, in addition to being the com- 
poser of the opera Betty, which was produced in Brussels, 
with Mariette Sully in the leading part. Melba herself con- 
templates appearing in the leading role in his second opera, 
Leila. De Lorey had made some most adventurous 
expeditions, including one with Pierre Loti in Caucasia, and 
he was such a brilliant raconteur of his adventures that I 
asked him why he did not make a book of them. He replied 
that the travel-book is not the institution in France which 
it is in England, and that though he spoke English fluently, 
he could not write a book in English. Finally we decided 
to collaborate as related in a later chapter. 

We had many Asiatic visitors, but no Africans, I think, 
unless one counts Englishmen who had won their spurs in 
the dark continent, like Sir Frederick Lugard. Decidedly 
our most interesting Asiatic visitors were Japanese like 
Yoshio Markino and Prof. Nakamura. Prof. Nakamura 
was for three years a pupil of Lafcadio Hearn. He came 
over to England for the Japanese Exhibition, and remained 
here a few years, studying educational methods for the 
Japanese Government. 

He said that Lafcadio Hearn would see nothing of his 
pupils because he was only interested in the Old Japan, and 
was afraid of introducing modern ideas if he saw inuch of 
any Japanese who were not absorbed in the same studies as 
himself. I remember Bret Harte pleading much the same 
objection to revisiting California. 

Yoshio Markino has been one of our most intimate friends 
for years. I cannot say in what exact year he first came to 
32 Addison Mansions. I know that I first met him through 
M. H. Spielman, who wrote to me telling me all about Mar- 
kino's powers as a black-and-white artist, and asking me to get 



LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 69 

my editor friends to give him some work, of which he stood in 
need. Not until he pubhshed A Japanese Artist in London 
at my suggestion, and with a preface written by me, a few 
years after, did I know how badly he stood in need of that 
work; Japanese etiquette prevented him from intruding 
his private affairs upon a stranger. I was successful in 
getting him a little illustrating work, and I got him some 
translating work, better paid, I suspect, than original con- 
tributions of men like the late Andrew Lang to the great 
Dailies. It came about in this wise : I was anxious to 
include in More Queer Things about Japan, a translation 
of a Japanese life of Napoleon, which had come into my 
hands. There were five volumes of it with extremely amusing 
illustrations. Neither I nor the publishers knew what a 
small amount of words can make a volume in Japanese. 
The publisher looked at the volumes and thought that he 
was making a very shrewd bargain when he offered five 
pounds a volume as the translator's fee. Each volume 
proved to contain about a thousand words, so Markino got 
five pounds a thousand, when the publisher meant to offer 
him about five shillings. 

After this I lost touch of Markino for a long time, till Miss 
E. S. Stevens, who had been my secretary, and was then 
doing work as a literary agent, invited us to meet him at 
her Club. Very soon after that I was at the annual soiree 
of the Japan Society with Miss Lorimer and another girl, 
and my cousin, Sampson Sladen, who was then only third 
in command of the London Fire Brigade, when we ran across 
Markino, who remained with us all the evening. He invited 
myself and the members of our household to the exhibition 
of the sketches which he had painted to illustrate The Colour 
of London. From that time forward his visits were very 
frequent till we left London, and on two separate occasions 
he went to Italy with us for several months. 

It was on the first of these occasions, while we were all 
staying at 12 Piazza Barberini in Rome, that he showed me 
a letter which he had written to Messrs. Chatto & Windus 
about the second of the volumes he illustrated, The Colour of 
Paris. The letter was as brilliant, as interesting, as amusing. 



70 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

as one of Robert Louis Stevenson's or Lafcadio Hearn's. 
I saw that he was a born writer, and from that time forward 
did not rest until I had persuaded him to write his first book, 
A Japanese Artist in London. I got him the contract from 
the pubhsher for this book and wrote the preface. 

While we were in Paris he brought us an invitation to 
dinner from the brilliant Parisian who was afterwards our 
dear friend, poor Yvonne, who died the other day after 
months of suffering. When we arrived she had a terrible 
headache, and we had to have our dinner without her, pre- 
sided over by her niece, a gay and pretty child of thirteen, 
who made as self-possessed a hostess as any grown-up. We 
talked a great deal that night over Italy, and a great deal 
more when Markino came to see us at the little Cite de Retiro, 
near the Madeleine, and the result was that he decided to 
do a book on Italy with Miss Olave Potter, he supplying the 
pictures, and she the letterpress — the book that took form 
as The Colour of Rome, which Messrs. Chatto & Windus 
promptly agreed to commission, and of which I shall have 
more to say elsewhere. That winter and the summer of 
another year we all spent together in Italy, and the painting 
of the illustrations for The Colour of Rome led indirectly to 
Markino's writing A Japanese Artist in London, and the 
beginning of his brilliant literary career. 

Markino's writings achieved such an instant popularity 
with English readers that I feel sure that they will like to 
know his habits of work, which I had the opportunity of 
observing during the two long visits he paid with us to 
Italy. For a painter of architecture and landscape his 
method is unique. Take, for instance, the story of the 
illustrations to Miss Olave Potter's book. The Colour of Rome. 
First of all, since he was a stranger to Rome, and knew 
neither its beauty spots nor its most interesting monuments, 
we took him walks to see all the most illustrable places. 
He selected from them the number he had promised to paint. 
Sometimes he took more than one walk to a place before he 
commenced the study for his picture, but intuition is one of 
his gifts, and he was seldom long at fault in discovering the 
best standpoint. 



LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 71 

Having chosen this, he took his drawing-pad to the spot 
and made a rough sketch of it with notes written in Japanese 
of the colours to be used, and any special things he had to 
remember. Sometimes, where there was a great deal of 
detail, or of sculpture, he used paper with crossed lines on 
it, so as to preserve his proportions. But Markino, beauti- 
fully as he can paint detail, resents it, and prefers subjects 
unified by a haze of heat or mist. 

He never took his paints out with him, and never did a 
finished drawing in the open air. He took his notes home 
with him and ruminated over them, till the idealised picture 
presented itself to his brain. Then he set to work on it, 
taking little rest till it was finished — always absolutely 
faithful to colour and effect, though the picture was painted 
entirely indoors. 

That was his method of painting. He did no writing in 
Rome. But he came constantly to our flat when he was 
writing A Jayanese Artist in London, My Idealled John 
Bullesses, and When I was a Child. Sometimes he liked to 
talk over his chapters before he began to write them, when 
they were slow at taking shape. But more generally he 
brought the chapters written in the rough to his Egeria, and 
read them over to her. They had blanks where he could not 
remember the English word which he wanted to use. It was 
in his mind, and he would reject all words till he found the 
word he was thinking of. 

As he read the chapters aloud, the wise Egeria made 
corrections where they were necessary to elucidate his 
meaning — to clarify his style, but never treated any Japanese 
use of English as a mistake, unless it made the sense obscure. 
That is how the fascinating medium in which Markino writes 
took shape. 

Take, for instance, Markino's omission of the articles. 
The Japanese language has no articles. Markino therefore 
seldom uses them, and his English is written to be intelligible 
without them, just as a legal document is written to be 
intelligible without punctuation. Again, if he used a word 
in a palpably wrong sense — i. e. with a meaning which it 
had never borne before, or was etymologically unfit to bear 



72 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

— she left it if it helped to express in a forcible way what 
he intended. 

The result of this respectful editing was to produce a most 
fascinating and characteristic type of English, which has 
won for Markino a public of enthusiastic admirers. He has, 
as Osman Edwards said, the heart of a child, when he is 
writing, and he combines with it a highly original mode of 
thinking and expressing himself, but their effect would have 
been half lost if he had not found in his Egeria an adviser 
with the eye of genius for what should be corrected and 
what should be retained of his departures from conventional 
English. 

When the chapters were corrected thus, Egeria typed 
them out, making any corrections or additions which were 
necessary to the punctuation, and generally preparing the 
manuscript for the press. 

I am encouraged to think that these details of the way 
in which the books were edited will interest the public, 
because J. H. Taylor, the golf champion, once cross-examined 
me on the subject, as we were walking down the lane from 
the Mid-Surrey golf pavilion to his house. He had been 
reading A Japanese Artist in London, and was so delighted 
with it that he wanted to know exactly how this wonderful 
style of writing was born. 

And there is no doubt that it is a wonderful style of writing. 
It is not pigeon-English; the Japanese do not use pigeon- 
English, they abhor it. It is the result of a deliberate 
intention to apply certain Japanese methods of expression 
(like the omission of the article) to the writing of English, 
in order to produce a more direct medium, and the result 
has been a complete success. Markino's English is wonder- 
fully forcible. It hits like a sledge-hammer. He has a 
genius for discovering exactly the right expression, and he 
thinks on till he discovers it. As a reason why his English 
is not broken English, but a medium using the capabilities 
of both languages, I may mention that he has been living in 
America and England for nearly twenty years. 
Besides Japanese, we had many Indian visitors. 




C '^ 

OS s 



CHAPTER VIII 

OUR AT-HOMES : THE YOUNG AUTHORS WHO ARE 
NOW GREAT AUTHORS 

Of all the men who used to come to 32, Addison Mansions 
from our having met them at the Idler teas, none were more 
identified with the success of Jerome's two periodicals The 
Idler and To-day than Arthur Conan Doyle and Israel 
Zangwill. Doyle had been writing for ten years before 
he achieved commanding success. Be that as it may, 
he was undoubtedly the most successful of the younger 
authors who were familiar figures in that Vagabond and 
Idler set. Doyle, who was the son of that exquisite artist, 
Charles Doyle, and grandson of the famous caricaturist 
H. B., and nephew of Dicky Doyle of Punch, ought to have 
been granted a royaller road to success, for he had enjoyed 
a very early connection with literature, having sat as a little 
child on the knee of the immortal Thackeray. Thackeray's 
old publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., have been his, but he 
had travelled to the Arctic regions and to the tropics and 
practised for eight years as a doctor at Southsea before he 
charmed the world with his famous novels The White Company 
in 1890, and The Refugees in 1891, and astonished it with 
the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the latter year. He 
was a doctor at Norwood when I first made his acquaint- 
ance. He was a little over thirty then, and a keen cricketer, 
being nearly county form (indeed, he did actually play once 
for Hampshire, and might at one time have played regularly 
for Hampshire as an Association back). It was not until 
late in life, however, that he found time enough to get much 
practise at games. Then for some years he played occasional 
first-class cricket, having an average of thirty-two against 
Kent, Derbyshire and other good teams ; in the last year he 

73 



74 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

played for the M.C.C. That was after the war, when he was 
over forty. He played a hard Association match in his 
forty-fourth year. 

From an early stage in his literary career he enjoyed 
the admiration and the deepest respect of all his fellows in 
the craft, and for years past has undoubtedly been morally 
the head of the profession. Upon him has fallen the mantle 
of Sir Walter Besant. In saying this, I am not instituting 
any comparison between the merits of his various lines of 
work, which in their own line are quite unexcelled, and 
those of the other leading authors, but he is not only 
among the handful who may be called the very best authors 
of the day, he is the man to whom the profession would 
undoubtedly look for a lead in any crisis. 

Say, for instance, that the idea, so often debated recently, 
of authors combining with publishers to fix the price of a 
novel at ten and sixpence, and refusing to work for or sell 
their goods to any one who would not abide by this decision, 
were put to a vote in the literary profession, what Doyle 
thought would count most. The profession as an army 
would range themselves under his banner. Suppose 
a question, like the insurance question which has been 
threatening the livelihood of thousands of doctors, were to 
arise for authors, they would look to Doyle for a lead. If 
the decision which he made benefited authors as a whole, but 
cost him half or three-quarters of his income, and a syndicate 
approached him with a huge offer to abandon the camp, 
nobody could suppose for one moment that Doyle would 
listen to them. His moral courage, his loyalty, his generosity, 
his patriotism, added to his wonderful literary gifts, have 
confered upon him a commanding position. Of his gifts 
I shall speak lower down. It is as the patriot that one must 
always consider him first. He is not naturally a party man, 
though he happens to have contested Edinburgh as a Liberal 
Unionist, and the Hawick boroughs as a Tariff Reformer. 
There have been moments when he has been openly opposed 
to some measure of the Unionist Party. He really belongs 
to the Public Service party. He made notable sacrifices 
for his country at the time of the Boer War. First he gave 



I 




SIR A. CONAN DOYLE 
Drawn by Yoshio Markiuo 



OUR AT-HOMES 75 

up his literary work to serve unpaid on the staff of the 
Langlam Field Hospital and afterwards to write the pamphlet 
on The Cause and Conduct of the War, an attempt to place 
the true facts before the people of Europe, which brought 
him nothing but great expense and the undying gratitude 
and respect of his fellow-countrymen. That he cares nothing 
for popularity where principles are concerned is shown by 
the attitude he took over the famous horse-maiming case, 
or his acceptance of the Presidency of the Divorce Law 
Reform Union. 

His sturdy character is reflected in his physique, and there 
are few people in London who do not know that unusually 
big and strong frame, that round head, with prominent 
cheek-bones, and dauntless blue eyes, the bluff, good- 
humoured face : for his sonorous voice is frequently heard 
from the chair of public meetings where some protest for 
the public good has to be raised, or at a dinner table on the 
guest nights of clubs. Sir Arthur, for he was knighted in 
1902, is a most popular speaker ; hearty, engaging, amusing, 
in his lighter moods, most trenchant and convincing in a 
crisis, of all the authors of the day he merits most the title 
of a great man. 

The curious thing is that although every one knows how 
much he respects Doyle as a great man, and every one is 
aware that he is one of the most popular, if not the most 
popular, of the authors of the day, not every one has analysed 
the soundness of his literary fame. In my opinion, of all very 
popular authors, Doyle deserves his popularity as an author 
most. No man living has written better historical novels, 
judged from the standpoint of eloquence, accuracy or thrill. 
Doyle has carried the accuracy of the man of science into all 
his studies, and his power to thrill with eloquence and incident 
is beyond question. His detective stories are equal to the 
best that have ever been written. His history of the South 
African War is not only the best history of the war, but it 
is a model of contemporary history, always the most difficult 
kind to write, because only the eye of intuition can dis- 
tinguish respective values amid contemporary incidents. 
He has been highly successful as a playwright too. His House 



76 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

of Temperley is the best Prize-Ring play in the language, as 
his novel, Rodney Stone, which had no lady-love heroine, 
was the best Prize-Ring novel, and his play on Waterloo, 
produced by Sir Henry Irving, has become a classic. I have 
alluded elsewhere to the dramatisation of his Sherlock Holmes 
which has been played thousands of times. Doyle not 
only was present at our at-homes at 32 Addison Mansions, 
but, living out of town, once stayed with us there, as we 
stayed with him at Hindhead on another occasion. But 
owing to his living out of town, he was a great deal less 
familiar figure at receptions than most of the other younger 
authors of the first rank, except Rudyard Kipling and 
J. M. Barrie, both of whom cordially hate " functions " of 
any kind. Doyle, placed in the same circumstances as they 
are, forces himself to go to many functions for which he has 
less time than they have, for his literary output is infinitely 
greater, and he has so many other duties to perform, and 
always performs them. 

When I asked Doyle what first turned him to writing, he 
said — 

" All the art that is in our family — my grandfather, three 
uncles, and father were all artists — ran in my blood, and 
took a turn towards letters. At six I was writing stories; 
I fancy my mother has them yet. At school I was, though 
I say it, a famous story-teller; at both schools I was at I 
edited a magazine, and practically wrote the whole of it 
also. 

" When I started studying medicine, the family affairs 
were very straitened. My father's health was bad, and 
he earned little. I tried to earn something, which I did by 
going out as medical assistant half the year. Then I tried 
stories. In 1878, when I was nineteen years old, I sent 
The Mystery of the Sassasa Valley to Chambers. I got three 
guineas. It was 1880 before I got another accepted. It was 
by London Society. From then until 1888 I averaged about 
fifty pounds a year, getting about three pounds a story. 
My first decent price was twenty-eight pounds from the Corn- 
hill for Habakuk Jephson's Statement in 1886. Then at New 
Year, 1888, Ward, Lock & Co. brought out A Study in 



OUR AT-HOMES 77 

Scarlet, paying twenty-five pounds for all rights. I have 
never had another penny from that book; I wonder how 
much they have had ? Then came Micah Clarke at the end 
of 1888, which got me a more solid public. It was not until 
1902 that I was strong enough to be able to entirely abandon 
medical practice. Of course, it was the Holmes stories in 
the Strand which gave me my popular vogue, but The White 
Company, which has been through fifty editions, has sold far 
more as a book than any of the Holmes books." 

Kipling I regard as the genius of the junction of the nine- 
teenth and twentieth centuries, and England owes an in- 
calculable debt to his patriotism and eloquence. If Doyle 
is the voice of the literary profession, Kipling is the voice of 
the country. He speaks for the manhood of England in 
a crisis. All through the African War a letter or a poem 
from Kipling was the trumpet voice of national feeling. 
No poet who has written in English has ever inspired his 
countrymen like Kiphng. His poems, though they have 
not the poetical quality of those of our great standard poets, 
have the prophetical quality, which is just as important in 
poetry, in a higher degree than any of them. They are 
Rembrandt poems, not Raphael poems, and they will remain 
without loss of prestige, an armoury for every patriotic or 
manful writer and speaker to quote from. I reviewed 
Kipling's poems when they were first published in America 
for the leading Canadian paper. I am thankful that I 
hailed them as the work of genius, and it was a proud moment 
when I first shook hands with him in the early 'nineties. 
Though his short stories are the best in the language, I always 
think of him as a poet, because he is our vates. 

It is best to mention Barrie, our other genius, here, though 
I have little to say about him. On the rare occasions when 
he speaks in public, he speaks admirably, and he enjoys 
universal respect. As far as literature is concerned, no 
man's lines have been laid in pleasanter places. Unlike 
Doyle, Anthony Hope, Stanley Weyman and others, Barrie 
did not have to wait for recognition. It is notorious that 
from the very beginning he never had the proverbial manu- 
script in the drawer; in other words, that he always found 



78 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

an immediate sale for whatever he wrote. He began as a 
journaHst. 

Anthony Hope I first met at an Idler tea. He was one 
of the brilliant band of younger authors whom Jerome was 
among the first to recognise. In those days he kept the 
distinction between " Anthony Hope " the writer, and 
Anthony Hope Hawkins the barrister, most rigidly. Being 
the son of a famous London clergyman, Mr. Hawkins, of St. 
Bride's, Fleet Street, a cousin of Mr. Justice Hawkins, a 
scholar of Balliol, and an eloquent speaker, his prospects at 
the Bar were very good. There was an idea that they would 
suffer if it were known that he indulged in anything so 
frivolous as writing love-stories. These were the days when 
he was composing his immortal " Dolly Dialogues " for the 
Westminster Gazette, and when he was just beginning the 
succession of witty and delicate novels which made his fame. 
He had, I have always understood, been writing for some 
years, before he could make any impression on the public, 
and even then he had no hope of making a living by literature. 
I made one of his early novels my book of the week in The 
Queen, in a most enthusiastic review, and incidentally 
mentioned his real name. His friends, perhaps they were 
officious, entreated me not to do it again, lest it should 
injure his prospects. A year or two afterwards there was 
no question off which profession he was to make a living, 
though as he coquetted with politics, and contested a con- 
stituency or two, he probably kept up the legal fiction of his 
being at the Bar for some time longer. 

As he had enjoyed the distinction of being President of 
the Oxford Union, he was a practised speaker before he 
came to London. He had plenty of opportunities of exer- 
cising his skill without waiting for briefs, for he became a 
frequent speaker at Club dinners. The charm of his voice 
and his delivery, the polish and wit of his speeches were 
recognised at once, and his popularity as a speaker has been 
undisputed from that day to this. 

It was noticed that, though he was so brilliant and fluent, 
when making a speech, he was rather a silent man at re- 
ceptions, except where politeness demanded that he should 



OUR AT-HOMES 79 

exert himself. But this is a common trait in the more con- 
siderable authors. They are frequently not only rather 
silent, but ill at ease. In those days one could count the 
authors who were both brilliant socially and brilliant writers, 
on one's fingers. 

One legal habit Anthony Hope retained; he went to 
chambers to do his writing as he had been accustomed, 
and lived in other chambers, and was regarded as a con- 
firmed bachelor till he married. He came to Addison 
Mansions very frequently in the 'nineties. The incident I 
remember best was his loss of presence of mind when I tried 
to save him from a terrific American bore, a middle-aged 
lady. Somebody had brought her; I had not met her 
before, and she was having a systematic lion-hunt. She 
thought that A. H. H. was Anthony Hope, but she was not 
certain, and said to me, " Is that Anthony Hope ? I must 
know Anthony Hoye.'" 

Wishing to save him from the infliction, because he was 
always rather distrait with bores, I said, " That is Mr. 
Hawkins." I didn't think she knew enough about literature 
to be aware of the identity, nor did she, but he had un- 
fortunately caught the words " Anthony Hope," and smiled, 
and started forward, and was lost. As he had unconsciously 
convicted me of falsehood, I left him to his fate. 

Generous to needy brother authors, punctilious in the 
performance of the duties to the literary profession, which 
his eminence confers on him (in such matters as the Authors' 
Society and literary clubs), wonderfully patient and courteous, 
an admirable literary craftsman, who never turns out slip- 
shod work, as well as a brilliant romancer and witty dialogist, 
Anthony Hope Hawkins deserves every particle of his 
popularity and success. 

I have not dilated on his plays, though he has achieved 
great success on the stage, because dramatists tell me that 
he is not going to write for it any more. 

The popularity of our at-homes was at its height before 
Frankfort Moore had decided to come over to England, 
giving up the editorial post he held in Ireland, to devote all 
his time to novel-writing. He and his delightful wife, the 



80 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

sister of Mrs. Bram Stoker, took lodgings at Kew, and were 
ready for many receptions, so that he might meet his fellow- 
authors in London. As Bram Stoker had then for years 
been Irving's right hand, they had an excellent introduction 
ready-made, but they brought letters of introduction to us, 
and, up to the time of his leaving London, he was among 
our most intimate literary friends. 

Frankfort Moore's success in London was instantaneous, 
as well it might have been, since he was a brilliant and witty 
speaker, as well as a writer of brilliant, witty and very 
charming books. Hutchinson eagerly took up the publica- 
tion of his works, and the literary clubs soon learned to 
depend upon him as one of the best after-dinner speakers. 
In about ten years he made a fortune, and retired to take 
things in a more leisurely way at an old house in Sussex, 
where he was able to adequately house his fine collection of 
old oak, old brass, old engravings and old china, in which he 
was a noted connoisseur. 

His immediate success justified his giving up his lodgings 
at Kew, and taking a nice, old-fashioned house in Pembroke 
Road, which he soon began to transform with his panelling, 
and his collections. His retirement from London left a 
great gap in many social circles. He was a universal favourite 
— a man of real eminence, although he regarded his achieve- 
ments so modestly. 

One of the most valued of our visitors was the celebrated 
Father Stanton, of St. Alban's, Holborn, who introduced 
himself to me when he was on his way to Syracuse with 
F. E. Sidney, with whom he went to Seville on that expedition 
which resulted in the publication of the latter's Anglican 
Innocents in Spain, the book which aroused such anger 
among Roman Catholics. We were the only two occupants 
of a sleeping compartment on the Italian railways. He was 
not wearing clerical dress, and I had no notion who he was 
until the conclusion of our journey, when Sidney, who had 
joined us, informed me. We did a lot of sight-seeing in 
Syracuse together, especially in the cathedral (built into an 
entire Greek temple, ascribed to Pallas Athene). Both 
Stanton and Sidney were experts in old gilt, in which Sicily 



OUR AT-HOMES 81 

is very rich — the organ at Syracuse is an example. From 
that time until Stanton's death we constantly met at the 
house of Sidney, who has the best collection of sixteenth- 
century stained glass in England, and built a house in Frognal 
with the proper windows to receive it. Though Stanton and 
I did not agree in Church matters, we were yet staunch 
friends, and I was an immense admirer of one who did so 
much for the regeneration of the poor in one of the worst 
districts of London. 

The greatest compliment we ever received at our at- 
homes was when Lord Dundonald, who had known us for 
some years, and had just come back from his famous relief 
of Ladysmith with his irregular cavalry, came and spent the 
best part of the afternoon with us. He looked worn and very 
sunburnt, but it was one of the events of our lifetimes to hear 
the stirring details of England's greatest military drama in 
this generation, direct from the lips of the man who had 
given it its happy termination. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 

Among the crowd of humorists who honoured Addison 

Mansions vnth their presence it is natural to mention first 

the famous author of Three Men in a Boat. There is no 

author for whom I feel a greater affection, though, as he 

once said, " You and I are sure to have a diametrically 

opposite opinion upon almost any point which may turn up, 

because we were born the poles apart." I was at the time 

his chief and only book critic on To-day. I believe I was 

called the literary editor, though all the patronage of the 

position was exercised by himself. It is patronage which 

constitutes an editor ; the sub-editor can perform the duties. 

I believe also that it was I who suggested the name To-day. 

At any rate, it was I who helped him to formulate the paper, 

and for the first year or so it was my duty to do all the 

book reviews in it, and my duty to receive all the ladies 

who came to see Jerome about the paper. Of course, they 

mostly came in search of work or fame : those who wished 

to be written about were very numerous, and expected to 

succeed by making what is called the " Glad Eye " at him. 

He was terribly afraid of the " Glad Eye " ; it made him 

turn hot and cold in swift succession. He was unable to 

say " no " to a siren, and equally unable to say " yes " when 

he meant " no." He was also an intensely domesticated 

man, entirely devoted to his family, and without the smallest 

desire for a flirtation. So it fell to my lot to pick up the 

" Glad Eye," a very agreeable job, when you have not the 

power to give yourself away. I had no patronage to bestow 

upon them. The only thing I could do for them was to 

write about them if they were sufficiently interesting, which 

frequently happened in that age of personal journalism. 

82 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 83 

And, if they were quite harmless worshippers, without any 
ulterior designs, I occasionally induced Jerome to be wor- 
shipped for a minute or two. I made many lady friends at 
this period, especially from the Stage. 

Jerome hardly ever answered letters. He used to say, 
" If you keep a letter for a month, it generally answers 
itself." But he did not keep them. He tore them up directly 
he had glanced at them. He knew at one glance — probably 
at the signature — if he wanted to read a letter, and, if he 
did not, he tore it up without reading it. He had a horror 
of accumulating papers. He sometimes asked me to answer 
letters, as he had faith in me as a soother. It was never 
part of my duties to write " yes," I had to gild " no." He 
prefcred to word his own acceptances, so as not to say 
more than he meant. He did not even want me to read the 
manuscripts. He prefered to read them himself. It did 
not take him long, because if he did not come across something 
worth publishing by the second page, he did not read any 
further. " You must grab your reader at the beginning," 
he used to say. 

He was a very pleasant man to write reviews for. He 
believed in generous criticisms. " You can have a page or 
two pages for your book of the week," he said, " according 
to its importance " — he decided that when I chose my book 
— " but you can only have a page for the rest of the books 
that come in, so you can't afford to waste your space on 
bad books. If you can't say anything good about them, 
you obviously can't afford them any space. You can praise 
things up as much as you like if you can be convincing about 
it : don't be afraid to let yourself go about the book of the 
week : I am sick of the Spectator and the Athenceum, you 
never get a full-blooded review out of them, unless it's to 
damn something. The more knowledge you can show about 
the subject of the book you are praising, the better. But 
above all things, recommend it in the paper just as you would 
recommend it to a friend : use the same language as you 
would to a friend : be natural. And, whatever you do, 
beware of the Club Man. When I read an article or a story, 
I always ask myself what a Club Man would think of it; 



84 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

and if I know that he would hke it, I turn it down : his 
opinions are dead opposite to the PubUc's." 

The Hkes and dislikes of the Club Man was one of the 
matters in which my opinion was dead opposite to Jerome's. 
The Club Man and the Man in the Street between them fill 
the ranks of the average patriotic citizen. It is they who 
pull the nation through in a crisis, and the City of London 
leads them. At ordinary times their voice is drowned by 
the noise of the Radical Party, and the giant Middle-class, to 
whom all appeals for national safety have to be addressed — 
the blind Samson sitting chained in the house of his enemies 
— cannot hear their warnings. 

In any case, it is so hard for a book to be popular at clubs, 
where people go to be interested and amused, that if it is 
popular there, it will be popular anywhere, except with the 
Nonconformist Conscience. 

Jerome had written Three Men in a Boat and The Idle 
Thoughts of an Idle Fellow before I met him, and was conse- 
quently in enjoyment of world-wide fame. He had estab- 
lished in the Idler a monthly which had no equal then as 
a magazine of fiction, and had a sale of a hundred thousand 
copies a month, when he started To-day. He started it not 
only to amuse, but to educate Public Opinion, when it had 
secured attention by its brightness, for he had very strong 
views which he was eager to preach. 

He was more of a Conservative than a Radical in those 
days; he had not despaired of the Conservatives, then, 
though he was baggy about beastly little nationalities. 
Suffragism had not then begun its March of Unreason, and 
we were all in favour of giving woman a vote. But I am 
bound to register the conviction that, if Suffragism had been 
a burning question then, the paper would have been full of 
it, and enjoying a circulation of a million, or whatever 
number the adult women suffragists run to. I can picture 
Jerome, a man famous for his hospitalities, being reduced to 
a hunger-strike by the ardour with which he would have 
espoused the idea. He was always tilting against some 
abuse, always asking for litigation. And he got it — or 
I suppose he would be editing a newspaper now, instead of 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 85 

delighting both hemispheres with his plays. I say advisedly 
" both hemispheres," because he has a considerable public 
as a dramatist in America. 

One of the first books on which I let myself go, and wrote 
an absolute appreciation, was that magnificent historical 
novel of Stanley Weyman's, A Gentleman of France. Jerome 
was delighted with the way I handled it. 

Seeing Jerome so much in the office led to our being a 
good deal at each other's houses. He was living at that time 
in one of the nice old villas in St. John's Wood. The chief 
thing I remember about it was its cattiness and its scrupulous 
tidiness. When you stay with him in the country, you 
cannot leave your stick and hat in the hall, handy for running 
out, as you might at Sandringham or Chatsworth. They are 
at once arrested, and are very lucky if they get off with a 
warning from the magistrate. 

One of my diametrical divergencies from Jerome is in the 
love of cats. I cannot respect a cat. To me it is a beast of 
prey, a sort of middle-class tiger, operating in a small way, 
but at heart a murderer of the Asiatic jungle. Jerome loves 
them, and makes dogs of them : he used to fill the Idler 
with Louis Wain's human deductions from cats. He has 
a telephone to their brains. I agree with Lord Roberts, 
who knows by instinct when there is a cat in the room, 
though it may be wholly concealed, and cannot enjoy himself 
until it is removed. 

Like most real humorists whom I have known, and I have 
known many from Mark Twain and Bill Nye downwards, 
Jerome is not a " funny man " in ordinary life. He is, on 
the contrary, except when he is on his legs, before an audience, 
or taking his pen in his hand, apt to be a very serious man, 
though his conversation is always illuminated by flashes of 
wit. He is much more apt to air strong opinions about 
serious questions. The Jerome you see in Paul Kelvin and 
The Third Floor Back is the real Jerome. He is the loyalest 
friend and most tender-hearted man imaginable. His kind- 
ness and hospitality are unbounded. You cannot stay with 
Jerome in his own house without being inspired by the deepest 
respect and affection for him. He is an ideal husband and 



86 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

father, a friend of the struggHng, a just and generous master. 
Like Conan Doyle, though he has never shone in first-class 
cricket or golf, Jerome is very athletic in his tastes. In spite 
of his glasses, he is a fine tennis-player and croquet-player; 
he is a fine skater also, and devoted to the river and horses. 
It was partly a horse accident in which he and Norma 
Lorimer were involved, and both showed extraordinary 
courage, which made me feel for him as I do. 

He is essentially an open-air man, whose thoughts are all 
outside directly he has got through his statutory amount of 
work with his secretary. 

But though the serious man weighs down the humorist 
in Jerome, you would not guess it from his personal appear- 
ance. When he rises to speak, his bright eye, the smile 
playing round his mouth, his cool confident bearing, the 
very way in which he arranges his hair, which has not yet 
a particle of grey about it, is more suggestive of the humorist, 
the man who is accustomed to making hundreds roar with 
laughter at his speeches, and scores of thousands with the 
flashes of his pen. 

Jerome has no love for London, though he has a town 
residence and enjoys Bohemian society, and is very popular 
in it. For many years he has lived on the Upper Thames, 
and he is in the habit of going to Switzerland for the skating. 

I asked Carl Hentschel, who was one of the three who went 
on the trip immortalised in Three Men in a Boat, to tell me 
about it. He said — 

" It is rather interesting to look back to the days of Three 
Men in a Boat. Jerome at that time was in a solicitor's 
office in Cecil Street, where the Hotel Cecil now stands, 
George Wingrave was a junior clerk in a bank in the City, 
and I was working in a top studio in Windmill Street, close 
to where the Lyric Theatre now stands, having to look after 
a lot of Communists, who had had to leave Paris. Our one 
recreation was week-ending on the river. It was roughing 
it in a manner which would hardly appeal to us now. Jerome 
and Wingrave used to live in Tavistock Place, now pulled 
down, and that was our starting-point to Waterloo and thence 
to the river. It says much for our general harmony that, 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 87 

during the years we spent together in such cramped confine- 
ment, we never fell out, metaphorically or literally. It 
was Jerome's unique style which enabled him to bring out 
the many and various points in our trip. It was a spell of 
bad weather that broke up our parties. A steady downpour 
for three days would dampen even the hardiest river-enthu- 
siast. One incident, which, I believe, was never recorded, 
but would have made invaluable copy in Jerome's hands, 
happened on one of our last trips. We were on our way up 
the river, and late in the afternoon, as the sky looked threaten- 
ing, we agreed to pull up and have our frugal meal, which 
generally consisted of a leg of Welsh mutton, bought at the 
famous house in the Strand, now pulled down, with salad. 
We started preparing our meal on the bank, when the threat- 
ened storm burst. We hastily put up our canvas over the 
boat, and bundled all the food into it anyhow. It got pitch 
dark, and we were compelled to find the lamp and tried to 
light it. After a while we found the lamp, but it would 
not light; luckily we found two candle ends, and by their 
feeble light began our meal. We had hardly begun our meal 
when I said after the first mouthful of salad, ' What's wrong 
with the salad ? ' George also thought it was queer, but 
Jerome thought there was nothing wrong. Jerome always 
did have a peculiar taste. Anyhow, he was the only one who 
continued. It was not till the next day that we discovered 
that owing to our carelessness of using two medicine bottles 
of similar shape, one containing vinegar and the other Colza 
oil, the lamp and the salad were both a bit off," 

When I asked Jerome what first gave him the idea of 
writing he said — 

" I always wanted to be a writer. It seemed to me an 
easy and dignified way of earning a living. I found it 
difficult; I found it exposes you to a vast amount of abuse. 
Sometimes, after writing a book or play which seemed to me 
quite harmless, I have been staggered at the fury of indig- 
nation it seems to have excited among my critics. If I had 
been Galileo, attacking the solar science of the sixteenth 
century, I could not have been assaulted by the high priests 
of journalism with more anger and contempt. But the work 



88 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

itself has always remained delightful to me. I think it was 
Zangwill who said to me once, ' A writer, to succeed, has to be 
not only an artist, but a shopkeeper ' — and of the two, the 
shopkeeper is the more necessary. I am not sure who said 
that last sentence ; it may have been myself. 

" You write your book or play while talking to the morning 
stars. It seems to you beautiful — wonderful. You thank 
whatever gods there be for having made you a writer. The 
book or the play finished, the artist takes his departure, to 
dream of fresh triumphs. The shopkeeper — possibly a 
married shopkeeper with a family — comes into the study, 
finds the manuscript upon the desk. Then follows the selling, 
bargaining, advertising. It is a pretty hateful business, 
even with the help of agents. The book or the play you 
thought so fine, you thought that every one was bound to 
like it. Your publisher, your manager, is doubtful. You 
have a feeling that they are accepting it out of sheer charity — 
possibly they knew your father, or have heard of your early 
struggles — and yield to an unbusinesslike sentiment of 
generosity. It appears, and anything from a hundred to 
two hundred and fifty experienced and capable journalists 
rush at it to tear it to pieces. It is marvellous — their un- 
erring instinct. There was one sentence where the grammar 
was doubtful — you meant to reconsider it, but overlooked 
it; it appears quoted in every notice; nothing else in the 
book appears to have attracted the least attention. At 
nine-tenths of your play the audience may have laughed; 
there was one scene which did not go well; it is the only 
scene the critic has any use for. Their real feeling seems 
to be that the writer is the enemy of the public ; the duty of 
all concerned is to kill him. If he escapes alive, that counts to 
him. 

" I remember the first night of a play by my friend, Henry 
Arthur Jones. There had been some opposition; it was 
quite evident that the gallery were only waiting for him to 
appear to ' boo ' him, as if he had been a criminal on the way 
to the scaffold. I was standing by the gallery exit, and the 
people were coming out. Said one earnest student to 
another, as they passed me, ' Why didn't the little come 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 89 

out and take his punishment Uke a man ? ' ' Cowardly, I 
call it,' answered the other. They knew what was in store 
for him in the next morning's papers; they knew that a 
year's work, perhaps two, had been wasted. I suppose that 
it would be asking too much to suggest that they might also 
have imagined the heartache and the disappointment. The 
playwright who does not succeed in keeping every one 
of a thousand individuals, of different tastes and views and 
temperaments, interested and amused for every single 
minute of two hours, must not be allowed any mercy. 

" Yet for a settled income of ten thousand a year, and no 
worry, no abuse, and no insults, I do not think any of us 
would exchange our job. I suppose we are all born gamblers 
• — it is worth risking the half-dozen failures for the one 
success. 

" And the work itself, as I said — one only wishes one's 
readers enjoyed it half as much; circulations would be 
fabulous. Three Men in a Boat I started as a guide to the 
Thames. It occurred to us — George, Charles and myself — 
when we were pulling up and down, how interesting and 
improving it would be to know something about the history 
of the famous places through which we passed; a little 
botany might also be thrown in. I thought that other men 
in boats might also like information on this subject, and 
would willingly pay for it. So I read up Dugdale, and a 
vast number of local guides, together with a little poetry and 
some memoirs. I really knew quite a lot about the Thames 
by the time I had done, and with a pile of notes in front of 
me, I started. I think I had a vague idea of making it 
a modern ' Sandford and Merton.' I thought George would 
ask questions, and Harry intersperse philosophical remarks. 
But George and Harry would not ; I could not see them sitting 
there and doing it. So gradually they came to have their 
own way, and the book as a guide to the Thames is, I suppose, 
the least satisfactory work on the market. 

" I suppose, like Mrs. Gummidge, I felt it more. It must 
have been about five years before I succeeded in getting 
anything of mine accepted. The regularity with which the 
complimenting editor returned my manuscripts grew mono- 



90 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

tonous, grew heart-breaking. But, after all, it was The 
Times newspaper which accepted my first contribution. 
Some correspondence on the subject of the nude in Art made 
me angry, and I wrote a letter intended to be ironic. It 
attracted quite a lot of comment, and, fired by this success, 
I wrote to The Times on other topics. The Saturday Review 
praised their irony and humour, and Frank Harris invited 
me a little later to contribute. But we differed, I think, 
upon the subject of women. 

" The Passing of the Third Floor Back I wrote for David 
Warfield, the American actor, and discussed the matter with 
David Belasco in the train, when I was on a lecturing tour 
in America. I read him and Warfield the play at the Belasco 
Theatre in New York. It was after the performance was 
over, and we three had the great empty theatre to ourselves. 
Then we went to Lamb's Club, and Warfield, I think, had 
macaroni, and Belasco and I had kidneys and lager beer, 
and discussed arrangements. Firstly Anderson was to 
draw sketches of the characters, and it was while he was 
doing this in his studio at Folkestone that Forbes-Robertson 
dropped in for a chat. Percy Anderson talked to him about 
the play, and Forbes-Robertson took up the manuscript 
and read it. Belasco was a little nervous about the play. 
I did not like the idea of forcing it upon him, and other 
small difficulties had arisen, so, having heard from Percy 
Anderson that he had talked to Forbes-Robertson about the 
play, I thought I would go and see him. He, too, was nervous 
about it, but said that he felt that he must risk it. We 
produced it at Harrogate, for quite a nice, respectable 
audience, and they took it throughout as a farce. One or 
two critics came down from London, and commiserated with 
Forbes-Robertson on his luck. 

" It was the miners of Blackpool who put heart into us; 
they understood the thing, and were enthusiastic. Then we 
produced it at St. James', and, with one or two exceptions, 
it was besieged with a chorus of condemnation — deplorable, 
contemptible, absurd, were a few of the adjectives employed, 
and Forbes-Robertson hastened on the rehearsals for another 
play. A few days later, King Edward VII, passing through 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 91 

London on his way to Scotland, devoted his one night in 
London to seeing the piece. He said it was not the sort of 
thing he expected from Jerome, but he Hked it. And about 
the same time strange people began to come, who did not 
know what the St. James' Theatre was, and did not quite 
know what to do when they got there, and they liked it, 
too." 

I first met Zangwill — Israel Zangwill — at one of the old 
pothouse dinners of the Vagabond Club. He had not long 
given up editing Ariel, and was already known for his biting 
wit as a speaker. When the lean, arrestive figure of the 
Jewish ex-schoolmaster craned over an assemblage, there 
was always an attentive silence. He had not yet immor- 
talised himself by those inimitable etchings of Jewish life, 
in which the graver and the acid were employed so ruthlessly 
— the Tragedies and Comedies of the Ghetto. But he was 
in sympathies already a novelist, for on that particular 
occasion he was upbraiding Robert Buchanan for forsaking 
literature for the drama. His own eyes have wandered to 
the stage since then. The curly black hair — an orator's 
hair — the sallow complexion of the South, the pallor of the 
student, the eagle nose, the assertive smile, the confident 
paradox — how well I can recall them ! He was a young 
man in those days. 

Jerome was always a thorough believer in Zangwill. And 
he showed his judgment by making him his first serialist 
in To-day. He paid him five hundred pounds for the serial 
rights of the first of those remarkable novels of Jewish life, 
as much, I believe, as he paid for the serial rights of Ebb- 
Tide, the book R. L. Stevenson wrote in collaboration with 
his step-son, Lloyd Osbourne. 

Zangwill was a very constant and much-appreciated 
visitor at our at-homes, as was that encyclopaedia of know- 
ledge, his brother Louis. And their sisters sometimes came 
with them. They all lived together in those days at Kilburn. 
I remember going to a party at their house to meet Sir 
Frederick Cowen, the musician, which had a most comical 
finish. There were six of us left, and only one hansom 
between us. Three got inside, two sat on the splash-board, 



92 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

and Heinemann spread himself on the roof in front of the man, 
and kept filUng the skyhght with his face, Hke a Japanese 
Oni. Phil May sat in the middle inside. He was very 
excited, and we were trying to keep him quiet, so as not to 
draw the attention of the police to the fact that the hansom 
was carrying more than it was licensed for. When we got 
to the Edgware Road, he began to yell for the police, and 
a stalwart constable signalled to the cabby to heave to. He 
advanced to the side of the cab. " What is the trouble, 
sir ? " he asked, preparing to rescue the artist from the literary 
men among whom he had fallen. 

Phil gave one of his knowing smiles, and said, " I want to go 
to Piccadilly Circus, and they are trying to take me home." 

But to return to our Zangwills. Louis Zangwill had not 
yet shown his strength as a writer, but any one who had 
tested it, marvelled at the width of his knowledge. In 
those days Israel Zangwill favoured Slapton Sands for his 
summer holidays. We met him there. He used to wander 
about in a black coat and white duck trousers, gathering 
inspiration. The sunshine and scenery inspired him to be 
a perfectly delightful companion. We once met him yet 
further afield — at Venice. Norma Lorimer and I came 
upon him and Bernard Sickert, the artist, in the Casa Remer, 
an adorable old palace, with an open courtyard and a pro- 
cessional stair, on the Grand Canal. It was quite unspoiled 
by repairs in those days. It contained a curio-dealer by the 
water's edge, and at the head of the staircase was a large 
room in which a very beautiful young Jewish girl sat sewing 
for some sweating tailor. We had landed and made an 
archgeological excursion up the staircase, when we discovered 
her. She arose, and with proper presence of mind, and with 
a total absence of mauvaise haute, conducted us to the curio 
shop kept by papa. There we met Zangwill and Sickert. 
We were all of us tempted by some very beautiful mediaeval 
iron gates, which would have been a glory in any nobleman's 
park, but as we none of us had a park, and even the six 
hundred francs he wanted for them, added to the cost of 
transport to England, would have been a considerable sum 
for any of us, we denied ourselves, and Zangwill gave a dinner 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 93 

in honour of the event, at a tiny restaurant on a screwy httle 
canal behind the Piazza of San Marco. The food and the 
wine were excellent, and we sat on till the moon was high, 
and Venice, on those small old canals, looked like a theatrical 
representation of itself for The Merchant of Venice. Then 
we wandered back to the Piazza to Florian's, the cafe whose 
proud boast it is that it has never closed its doors day or 
night for four hundred years. If you are sleeping in Venice 
on a summer night— and, in spite of its noise and its mos- 
quitoes, is there anything more adorable than Venice on 
a summer night ? — you will find that the habit is not confined 
to Florian's. 

At Florian's we sat down to coffee. We could not get 
a seat outside ; the band was playing " La Boheme," and the 
municipality was throwing red and green limelight on San 
Marco in honour of a royal birthday. There was no waiter 
either, inside, and Sickert amused himself with drawing 
an almost life-sized head of Zangwill with a piece of charcoal 
which he had in his pocket, on the marble table. It was a 
bit of a caricature, but far the best likeness I ever saw of the 
great Jewish novelist. When the waiter did come, without 
waiting to take our orders, he went to fetch a damp cloth to 
clean the table. Ars longa, vita brevis — I would not let 
him touch it, and told the proprietor what a prize he had 
as I went out. I have often wondered what the fate of that 
table was. Zangwill, the apostle of Zionism, has always 
been intensely proud of his nationality, so he has never 
minded cutting jokes about it. He brought the house down 
at a Vagabond Christmas dinner, where he was taking the 
chair, by remarking in his opening sentence, " It's a funny 
thing to ask a Jew to do." This was the dinner at which he 
introduced to English audiences the story which had lately 
appeared in a German comic paper. A carpenter was in 
a crowd waiting to see the Emperor pass. He had an excellent 
position, but he was very uneasy because he had promised to 
meet a conceited young brother-in-law, and the brother-in- 
law had not turned up. 

" Will the Jackanapes never come ! " cried the carpenter. 
A policeman promptly arrested him. 



94 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

" I was speaking of my brother-in-law," gasped the poor 
carpenter. 

" You said ' Jackanapes ' ; you must have meant the 
Emperor," said the poUceman. 

When I asked Zangwill what made him turn to book- 
writing, he said — 

" I never ' turned ' to book- writing, because I never 
thought of doing anything else, and I have said all I have 
to say on that subject in the chapter of My First Book, 
published by Chatto & Windus, a book which should be a 
sufficient mine to you for all your friends. I was told at the 
Grosvenor Library that the middle-class Jews boycotted all 
my books — in revenge for the Jewish ones — but the Jewish 
' intellectuals ' have always rallied round me, for I remember 
that the Maccabeans gave me a dinner to celebrate the birth 
of Children of the Ghetto— s. dinner, by the way, at which 
Tree announced, amid cheers, that he had commissioned 
me to adapt Uriel Acosta. I never took the commission 
seriously, but I gave him a one-act play. Six Persons, which 
had a long run at the Haymarket (giving Irene Vanbrugh 
her first good part), and still survives, twenty years after, 
having been played quite recently at the Coliseum and the 
Palladium by Margaret Halstan as well as by Miss Helen 
Mar somewhere else. 

" An anecdote I remember telling at this dinner was : 
A man said to me, ' My son has had typhoid, but he enjoyed 
himself reading your book.' 

" ' Where did he get it from ? ' I asked, because it was 
the old three-volume days, and I knew he could not have 
bought it. 

" Thinking of the typhoid, he replied, ' From the drains.' 

" This theory of the origin of my book is, I believe, favoured 
in high ecclesiastical quarters." 

I knew Mark Twain very well. He and Bret Harte were, 
I suppose, the two most famous American authors who ever 
came to our at-homes at No. 32. Bret Harte, though he 
was such a typically American writer, spent all the latter 
part of his life in England. I first met him at Rudolph 
Lehmann's hospitable dinner-table. No one could fail to be 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 95 

struck with Bret Harte. He was so alert, so handsome, and 
though his plumes — his hair was thick and sleek to the day he 
died — were of an exquisite snow-white, he had a healthy, 
fresh-coloured face, and a slender, youthful figure, always 
dressed like a well-off young man. He used to come to our 
house with the Vaudeveldes. Madame Vaudevelde, herself 
an authoress, and the daughter of a famous ambassador, kept 
a suite of rooms in her great house in Lancaster Gate for 
his use, whenever he was in London. 

"Don't you ever go back to California nowadays?" I 
asked him once. 

" No. I dare say that if I saw the new California, with 
all its go-aheadness and modernness, I should lose the old 
California that I knew, whereas now it has never changed for 
me. I can picture everything just as it was when I left it." 

He retained his vogue to the end. Any magazine would 
pay him at the rate of a couple of pounds for every hundred 
words. They used to say that the Bank of England would 
accept his manuscripts as banknotes. He never failed to 
charm, whether he was telling some story at a dinner-party, or 
talking to some undistinguished woman, young and beautiful 
or old and plain, who had asked to be introduced to him as 
a celebrity — and a celebrity Francis Bret Harte certainly 
was, for he founded a whole school in English literature. 

Mark Twain was also very kind, but when I was in New 
York he was living at Hartford, the capital of the adjoining 
State of Connecticut. He described himself to me as a 
" wooden nutmeg," in allusion to a former thriving industry 
of the State. I met him when he was engaged to entertain 
a ladies' school at New York. That did not cost nothing. 
The idea seemed to me very American, that an author at the 
height of his fame, as Mark Twain then was — for he was 
fifty-five years old, and it was twenty-one years since he 
leapt into fame with The Jumping Frog, should accept an 
engagement to " give a talk " in a private house. The 
school received good value for its fee. He not only gave them 
an hour's entrancing address, but he stayed on till quite a 
late train, having anybody and everybody introduced to 
him, and being cordial to them all. Nor was his cordiality 



96 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

short-lived. I had done nothing then, except pubhsh a few 
books of verse. Yet we became and remained till the day of 
his death, twenty years later, familiar friends. This was 
before I received that memorable invitation from Oliver 
Wendell Holmes to be his guest at the monthly meeting of 
the Saturday Club at Boston, where Mark Twain proved 
that the English were mentioned in the Bible. ^ He told 
story after story in that address, but I don't remember any 
of them. They were all good in tendency, that was one 
thing; there was no making fun of anything that was good 
or noble or sincere with him. He was, like our own humorist, 
Jerome, intensely serious in his soul, and he was projecting 
a big book about the Bible — as a publisher, for he was 
already in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., 
who were producing the huge Library of American Literature, 
of which E. C. Stedman was joint editor. 

In order to make all great men authors, it had the idea to 
give the most famous sayings of historical Americans, where 
they had not written anything. In this way Abraham 
Lincoln became an author. I expect that it was that 
encyclopaedia which years afterwards brought the house of 
Charles L. Webster & Co. down, though it was sold " on 
subscription," with thousands of copies ordered before the 
book was begun. Mark Twain found himself responsible 
for debts of fifty thousand pounds. I met him soon after- 
wards, and began condoling with him on his losses as a 
publisher. He replied, " I am no publisher, nor ever was. 
I only put the money up for them to play with." 

To make up his losses to him, a leading American firm — 
I seem to recollect that it was the Harpers, but I may be 
wrong — made him a gigantic " syndicate " proposal for all 
rights, which brought in large sums of money. 

When I met him then, he had just come off ship-board. 
I asked him how he was. 

" Better'n I ever was in my life. I've gotten a new lease." 

"How?" 

" Well, it's a long story. You must know that when I am 

^ When challenged to prove it, he read out the text, " For the meek shall 
inherit the earth." 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 97 

staying in a hotel, or on board ship, I can't go to bed while 
there is one person left to talk to in the bar. This habit, 
I don't know what ways exactly, gave me a cough that I 
couldn't get rid of, till an old Auntie from Georgia told me 
to try drops of rum on sugar. It took away my cough, and 
I liked it fine. I went on taking it after my cough had gone ; 
it grew to be a habit, and before I knew where I was my 
digestion had gone. I tried all the doctors I could hear of, 
at home, and in England, and in Germany, including Austria, 
to cure that. But it was not possible; all they could do 
for me was to find out what I liked best to eat or drink, and 
tell me to do without it. I was wasting to a shadow, so 
I sent for my own doctor, and said to him, ' Doctor, I can't 
stand this any longer; life isn't worth living, what there is 
going to be of it, and that doesn't seem to be much. I am 
going to commit suicide.' ' Maybe it is the best thing to do,' 
he said. ' Do you know what is the most painless form of 
death? ' ' Yes,' said I, ' I am going to eat and drink every- 
thing I like best for a week, and according to all of you, it 
ought to take much less time than that.' 

" So I did, and I assure you, Mr. Sladen, before the week 
was up, I was as well as ever I had been in my life." 

He could reel off this sort of story by the hour, with that 
slow drawl of his, which was so mightily effective. 

Frank Stockton, the kindliest and most delicate humorist 
of America, I knew very well, and any one who knew him 
intimately could not help regarding him with affection. 
He was a little man with a club foot, and rather a timid 
expression, which he made use of when telling his immortal 
after-dinner stories; he emphasised the timidity until the 
point came, and his face was wreathed with smiles. Stockton 
was a great gardener. His garden out at the Holt near the 
Convent station in New Jersey was large and beautiful, and 
the product of his own imagination. It seemed incredible 
that a garden like that should have no kind of a hedge or 
fence, but he explained that in America to put a fence round 
your garden is considered an insult to the democracy, who 
by no means always deserve to be trusted in this matter. 

Stockton was so good-natured that his wife used to say 



98 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

he would never have done any work at all if he had not had 
a dragon at his side to guard him. She was not much like 
a dragon. But on one point she was inexorable ; when the 
time had really come for him to set about fulfilling a contract, 
she insisted on his going into New York to a hotel with as 
blank an outlook as possible, so that he should not waste 
time over gardening ; he could not trust himself within sight 
of a green leaf. 

Stockton was a wood-engraver to start with, and was 
thirty-eight years old before he abandoned it to do editorial 
work. A year later he became assistant-editor of St. Nicholas, 
the American children's magazine. It was not until 1880 
that he gave it up to devote himself entirely to book-writing. 
Up till 1879, the year in which he published Rudder Grange, 
he only wrote children's books, and he did not publish his 
next book for grown-ups. The Lady or the Tiger, for another 
five years. 

Another old member of the Vagabond Club, always a 
very intimate friend of Jerome's, who was often at our 
at-homes was Pett Ridge, the humorist whose knowledge 
of the East End of London is sometimes compared to 
Dickens's ; indeed, many consider him unequalled as a writer 
of Cockney humour and an interpreter of Cockney humanity. 
Unlike Jerome, Pett Ridge, who also has very earnest con- 
victions and has done a world of good, has the humorist 
in him always near the surface. He used to be a constant 
speaker at literary clubs, and most popular for his never- 
failing fund of humour, which was heightened by his demure 
delivery. 

With Pett Ridge, it is natural to mention W. W. Jacobs, 
our best sea humorist. People used to be surprised that 
the small, slight, youthful-looking man, who was known 
to them as a clerk in the General Post Office, should be the 
delineator of those inimitable captains and bo'suns and hands 
before the mast of little sailing-craft which ply round our 
coasts. He was one of the men to whom the members of 
the general public, who strayed to literary dinners, were most 
anxious to be introduced. Their admiration made him shy, 
and it was a long time before he grew accustomed to do him- 







JEROME K. JEROME 

Drawn by Yoshio Markino 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 99 

self justice in his public speeches, for he is one of our most 
genuine humorists. He owed his unique knowledge of 
coasting-craft and their navigators to the fact that his 
father owned a wharf on the Thames, and that it was one 
of his chief pleasures as a boy to go down to the wharf and 
make friends with the sea-dogs. After his marriage he went 
to live in Essex, but, as a bachelor living in London, he 
was a very familiar figure at our at-homes. To those who 
frequented literary gatherings in the days of which I am 
speaking, it is natural to think of H. G. Wells with Pett 
Ridge and Jacobs, but Wells was much less seen at these 
gatherings, because he lived out of town at Worcester Park. 
He was already married when I made his acquaintance, and 
had got through the first marvellous part of his career, on 
which he draws for so many of his books. 

He and his wife found a great difficulty in coming to our 
at-homes, because they were such very late-at-night affairs. 
Once they stayed with us, sleeping at the Temperance Hotel 
round the corner, called rather inappropriately the " London 
and Scottish," because all our bedrooms were turned into 
sitting-rooms for the night. The pair of them looked ridicu- 
lously young. Wells was very boyish in those days; he 
was slight in figure and youthful in face, with thick, rebellious, 
fairish hair, and a charmingly impulsive manner. It seems 
odd to think now that then he suffered from such very bad 
health that he was not expected to live long. Those were 
the days in which he used to write about flying men and 
scientific millennia, most brilliant books which told the 
British public that a genius had dropped from heaven, 
whose crumbs were picked up by Mr. John Lane. Wells 
became a Vagabond at a very early date, but he disliked 
making speeches, and, in point of fact, hardly ever did make 
one in his early days, so his wonderful literary gift was not 
recognised so quickly as it would have been if he had been 
constantly making speeches before literary clubs and other 
large audiences. 

A feature of Wells' writing is his marvellous versatility. 
He will make a hit on entirely fresh lines, indulge the public 
with a few other books on these lines, and then, before they 



100 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

have time to tire of them, break out in another fresh vein. 
It is hard to beUeve that the same man wrote Select Conversa- 
tions with an Uncle and Marriage, though it is true that 
seventeen years elapsed between their pubHcation, and there 
were many changes of style between the two. In those 
days he was only a brilliant novelist; now we recognise in 
him a profound thinker, a solver of social problems, even if 
we ourselves are Conservatives. 

In the New Machiavelli and Marriage there is intuition 
in every page and almost every line. You can read them 
with sheer delight for the writing alone ; they do not depend 
on the story, however excellent. 

Another humorist who was a constant visitor was Max 
O'Rell — the genial and irascible Frenchman who, as Paul 
Blouet, the name to which he was born, was principal French 
master at St. Paul's School. Max O'Rell lived in a house 
with a garden at St. John's Wood. We were very fond of 
him and his pretty wife, and much shocked when the two 
blows fell so quickly upon one another. Max O'Rell fought 
for France against the Germans, and he always looked a 
fighting man, with his strong figure and belligerent moustache. 
He was a fine fencer, and had, I am sure, fought duels in his 
time; with his temperament he could not have kept out 
of them; he was up in arms in a moment. I remember 
how fiercely he turned upon Norma Lorimer for using the 
expression, " The British Channel." 

" Why British? " he asked. 

But he was quite floored by the repartee, " Because of 
the weather." 

Max O'Rell was always quick at repartee himself — except 
in America. Of America and Americans he always spoke in 
public with his tongue in his cheek, but in private he was 
" screamingly funny " about them. He should certainly 
have left a posthumous volume of unpalatable truths about 
America. It would not have hurt him in the Great Beyond, 
and it would have convulsed the English-speaking world. 
He must often have felt in America as he felt at Napier, New 
Zealand, where the audience at the Mechanics' Institute, or 
some such place, would have none of him. 



THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 101 

" I am good enough for London and Paris," he said, 
speaking to me about it afterwards; " I am good enough for 
New York, Boston and Chicago; I am good enough for 
Melbourne and Sydney. But I am not good enough for 
Napier, New Zealand — Napier, with its five thousand 
inhabitants, etc., etc." 

He had the same staccato style in his lectures and after- 
dinner speeches as he had in his John Bull and His Island 
and his other famous books, and he easily drifted into it in 
his conversations. 

Other humorists of the little circle — it is to be noted 
how many there were — were Robert Barr, Barry Pain and 
W. L. Alden. Barr, as co-editor of the Idler, was a pivot 
of literary society like Jerome. But his home for a con- 
siderable portion of the period was a long way down in 
Surrey, too far for his friends to pursue him to it. This was 
not without design, for he was a man so fitted to shine in 
literary society, that his one chance of writing his delicate 
and delightful novels was to bury himself in the country. 

He made his reputation as " Luke Sharp," the most 
brilliant humorist of the Detroit Free Press, at that time the 
most-quoted paper in America, and he was very American 
both in appearance and speech. His brusqueness and 
pugnacity were at times terrifying, but underneath them lay 
a gentle nature and a most affectionate heart. He was a 
man who inspired and returned the warmest affection. His 
grim humour was famous : it suited the handsome features, 
marred with smallpox, the close-trimmed naval officer's 
beard, the sturdy frame, the strong American accent, much 
better than his dainty love-stories did. There was no more 
popular speaker; his influence among his fellow- journalists 
was unbounded. He and his pretty and charming wife, an 
excellent foil for his pugnacious exterior, were frequent hosts 
at the Idler teas, and frequent guests at our flat. Barr was 
very biting about England's national foibles, but they 
never moved him to such outbursts of righteous indigna- 
tion as the intermittent immoralities of the United States 
Government. 

He remained faithful to his birthplace till his premature 



102 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

death, for he called two successive homes of his in the South, 
Hillhead, after the district of Glasgow in which he was born. 
In his later days he was so much the editor, so much the 
novelist, that one forgot the humorist, except when he was 
convulsing a knot of friends, to whom he was talking at a 
reception, or the audience he was addressing across a dinner- 
table. 

Barry Pain and W. L. Alden, on the other hand, were 
always humorists. Alden, who had a most whimsical mind, 
had been the American Consul-General at Rome, and had, 
in consequence, been made a Cavaliere by the Italian Govern- 
ment. His title was part of his humorous equipment. It 
seemed so droll that a typical, middle-class American like 
Alden, should be a cavalier. Both he and his wife were 
kindly and agreeable people, but most of his personality 
went into his writing. 

Barry Pain, on the other hand, had a forceful personality. 
Whenever you meet this cheery cynic, with his bright dark 
eyes, you know that you are in the presence of a man who 
was born to be editor of Punch. He was a constant speaker 
at literary clubs, though I don't think that he liked speaking 
at first. His speeches were full of the same brilliant paradoxes 
as his books. His cynicism was tempered by overflowing 
good-nature. He was always such a hearty man. He was 
another of the people who soon flew into the country to get 
away from parties, and have time for his numerous contri- 
butions to weekly journals. But while he lived in London 
he was very often at our house. I made his acquaintance 
at the Lehmanns' — he married Stella Lehmann — soon after 
he had come down from Cambridge. At Cambridge he had 
been R. C. Lehmann's bright particular star in Granta, and 
Lehmann, who had wealth, good looks, and a brilliant 
athletic record to back up his very great abilities as a writer, 
had at once become influential in London journalistic circles. 



CHAPTER X 

THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 

To use the famous expression applied by Dr. Johnson to 
his College at Oxford, we had quite a nest of singing-birds 
at 32 Addison Mansions, for, to mention only three of them, 
William Watson, John Davidson and Richard le Gallienne 
were at the same time habitues of our at-homes, and Bliss 
Carman, the Canadian, was constantly with us when he was 
over here. 

Sir Lewis Morris, who was considered likely to succeed 
Tennyson as laureate at a time when those young poets were 
in the nursery, sometimes walked down from the Reform 
Club to call on us, but he always came on odd afternoons, a 
tall man, with a gaunt red face, who in those days was inclined 
to put his poetical triumphs behind him, and be the Liberal 
politician. Personally, I much preferred the poems of Lord 
de Tabley, a delightfully dignified, gentle and affable per- 
sonage. His poems have never received full justice; for 
Graeco-Roman atmosphere he must be classed with those 
who come just below Shelley, Keats and Matthew Arnold — 
above Home's " Orion," I think. 

Edmund Gosse, who introduced me to Lord de Tabley, 
introduced me also to the late H. O. Houghton, at that 
time head of the eminent publishing firm of Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co., the John Murrays of America, and to the 
late Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century Magazine, 
two men at whose houses I met all the most famous authors 
of Boston and New York respectively. Gosse, who had for 
his brother-in-law the late Sir Alma Tadema, lived in those 
days at Delamere Terrace, and at his house on Sunday 
afternoons you always met authors of real distinction, men 
like Lord de Tabley, Maarten Maartens, Austin Dobson, or 

103 



104 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Wolcott Balestier, Kipling's brother-in-law, the type of 
genius in a frail body. Edmund Gosse, besides being one 
of those poets, rare nowadays, who preserve the traditional 
grace of form, the distillation of thought which characterises 
the poetical masters of the " Golden Treasury," was instru- 
mental in giving England Ibsen and the other Scandinavian 
giants of the generation. 

Austin Dobson, a man who has the mild and magnificent 
eye of Browning's Lost Leader, the Horace of lighter English 
poetry, began life, like Gosse, as a Civil Servant, and, like 
Gosse, is as felicitous in his essays and his criticisms as in 
his poems. But, since he lived at Ealing and had five sons 
and five daughters, he was very little to be seen at literary 
gatherings in the days of which I speak. 

It is natural to mention Andrew Lang with them. They 
were the three best lighter poets of their generation, but Lang 
had the advantage over the others of being one of the most 
brilliant scholars of his time — no man since the mighty 
Conington displayed such a mass of classical erudition, 
combined with a genius for popularising it, especially in the 
direction of translation. Lang's prose translations can be 
compared with Conington's rhymed versions of Virgil and 
Horace. He had also a passion for the occult, and was one of 
the best scholars in comparative occultology and mythology. 

His tall, lean figure, mop of grey hair, and screwed-up 
scholar's eyes, were as familiar among golfers and anglers 
as at the Savile Club, and other literary coteries, which he 
deigned to honour with his presence. He reduced rudeness 
to a fine art, and never showed his heart to any one old enough 
to understand it. But he was nearly a big man as well as a 
big scholar. 

One cannot think of Lang without thinking also of 
Frederic W. H. Myers, whom I met far earlier. As a child he 
was remarkable ; at thirteen, on entering Cheltenham College 
(where I was educated long afterwards), so precocious was 
his scholarship that he was placed with boys of seventeen 
and eighteen. I doubt if there ever has lived another English 
boy who learned the whole of Virgil by heart for his own 
pure delight, before he passed the school age. He won the 



THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 105 

senior classical scholarship in his first year at thirteen; 
besides gaining the first prize for Latin lyrics, he sent in two 
English poems in different metres, and both were the best 
and came out top ! 

At the university few men have won more honours. Myers 
was to Cambridge as Lang was to Oxford — and more also. 
He was greater in pure scholarship, and far greater as a 
poet, for he wrote " St, Paul," almost the finest quatrain 
poem in the English language. His later volume of poems, 
entitled The Renewal of Youth, is perhaps less well known, 
but this was the poem that he himself cared for most, and its 
compressed force and intensity of feeling and wonderful beauty 
of expression have gained it a steadily increasing public. 

In his later years he became more absorbed in psychical 
research. The success of his famous work, Human Person- 
ality, and its Survival of Bodily Death, is well known. The 
epilogue, pp. 341-352, has become almost a classic, and 
the book has now been translated into nearly all European 
languages. This would have surprised Frederic Myers 
enormously. He wrote to a friend in 1900, " I am occupied 
in writing a big book which I don't expect any one to read, 
but I do it for the satisfaction of my own conscience." 
He laboured in this field up to his death, with the same ardour 
and strenuousness that he threw into all his work. 

He was a wonderful personality — no one who ever saw 
his unforgettable eyes, and beautiful majestic head, and heard 
his marvellously eloquent voice, could ever forget him. 
Myers is buried just where he should be buried — by the side 
of Shelley and John Addington Symonds in the new Protestant 
cemetery at Rome, under the ancient cypresses which top 
the city wall. Close by, this wall of Aurelian is pierced by 
the gate through which St. Paul was led to his martyrdom. 
The people who stood on the wall where the author of " St. 
Paul " lies buried, could have seen the Saint pass out. 

Myers and H. M. Stanley married two sisters. I always 
though it so appropriate that Stanley's brother-in-law, one 
of the greatest scholars Cambridge ever nursed, should have 
been so great an explorer in the Universe. A mutual friend 
told me that when Myers was on his deathbed, Henry Sidgwick, 



106 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

the philosopher, quoted to Mrs. Myers some hnes in " The 
Renewal of Youth," the poem which Myers himself, and many 
of his Cambridge friends, thought the best of all his work — 

" Ah, welcome then that hour which bids thee lie 
In anguish of thy last infirmity ! 
Welcome the toss for ease, the gasp for air, 
The visage drawn, and Hippocratic stare; 
Welcome the darkening dream, the lost control, 
The sleep, the swoon, the arousal of the soul ! " 

Sidgwick thought these lines, and indeed, the whole poem, 
wonderful, far finer than " St. Paul." 

Of the younger generation of the poets, four of the most 
noted, William Watson, W. B. Yeats, John Davidson and 
le Gallienne, were at one time almost weekly at our flat. 
Watson, whose powerful clean-shaven face always reminded 
me of Charles James Fox, before that inventor of irresponsible 
Liberalism lost his looks by dissipation, I see still sometimes. 
It was only last year that he and his beautiful young wife 
asked me to visit them at their house in the country. 

The sturdy Yorkshire stock of which he came is reflected 
in his poems. He is accustomed to think and write upon 
large national and international movements, and he has a 
splendid gift of sonorous and epigrammatic diction. I did 
not share the views he expressed, but that did not prevent 
me from admiring the way in which he expressed them. In 
my mind, there was no question but that the laureateship 
lay between him and Kipling. But at Oxford Bridges already 
had a reputation as a poet while I was an undergraduate. 

When Yeats first came to our house he was a shock-headed 
Irish boy of twenty-six, without any regard for his personal 
appearance. He did not care whether he had any studs in 
his shirt or not, and once he came in evening dress without a 
tie. But we knew then that he was a genius, and the world 
knows it now. He has a fairy-like muse, whose quill is dipped 
in pathos. He had then only just given up the idea of being 
an artist, like his father. He was an art student for three 
years. His poems and plays will live. 

Yeats was very naive. I remember his complaining to me 
in the early days of the Irish Literary Society that it suffered 
under a grave disadvantage; its authors were unable to 



THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 107 

write as " nationalistically " as they would have desh'ed, 
because the Irish never bought books, and the brutal Saxon 
would not buy them if they went too far in denouncing him. 
Those were not his exact words, but they give the substance 
of them. One might fancy that these young men and young 
women, falling between the devil and the deep sea, took 
refuge in playwriting, because the Englishman will go and 
see a play which is sufficiently pathetic or sufficiently funny, 
no matter how disloyal to himself its sentiments may be; 
but his purse-strings are tighter with regard to displeasing 
books. Yeats was always highly appreciated. When he 
published John Sherman it was thought that he had a career 
as a novelist before him, but he did not follow this up. 

Another Irishman whom I may mention here is Dr. Tod- 
hunter, though he already had some silver in his beard twenty 
years ago, and was the doyen of our poets, and at the beginning 
the most considerable in his accomplishments. He had made 
his name with " The Black Cat " and the " Sicilian Idyll," 
and belonged to an older generation. 

English literature is much the poorer by John Davidson 
having taken his own life, in despair at the scantiness of the 
rewards which his genius could earn. Davidson was a man 
I liked very much. His robust personality was reflected in 
his brilliant eyes and colouring. His heartiness and sincerity 
were transparent and he was a very vital poet. He came 
often. Davidson was inspired ; there are lines of white 
fire in " The Ballad of the Nun." His cheery, courageous 
face and blithe smile did not in the least suggest a man who 
would commit suicide; they were much more suggestive of 
the bloods who lived in the piping times of King George III. 
He was another Lane discovery, I think, and I suspect that 
Lane brought him to our house, as he brought Bcardsley 
and many another man destined to be celebrated, W. J. 
Locke among them. 

Le Gallienne I knew better than any of them. He and his 
brother-in-law, James Welch, were conspicuous features at 
our parties, Welch because he was irresistibly funny, and in 
the habit of exercising his wonderful gift of mimicry at odd 
moments — we all believed in his future eminence. 



108 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Le Gallienne was even more conspicuous for his personal 
appearance and frank posing. He had a face hke Shelley, 
and the true hyacinthine curls, if hyacinthine curls mean 
the rich, waving black hair which one associates with the 
Greeks of mythology. He was really a rather vigorous and 
athletic man, and he used to say in the most captivating way, 
" You musn't mind me letting my hair grow, and living up 
to it — it is part of my stock-in-trade. People wouldn't come 
to hear me lecture without it." 

Undoubtedly his picturesque appearance made him one 
of the most striking figures in any literary assemblage, but 
he also had splendid gifts as a poet. I have always thought 
that his version of Omar Khayyam is one of the most beauti- 
ful, and has never received justice in comparison with other 
versions. Like Fitzgerald, he was unable to translate from 
the original, but that did not signify, because hardly any one 
in England, in or out of the Omar Khayyam Club, can under- 
stand the original, and the most popular version of the 
Rubaiyat is valued, not for what Omar put into it, but for 
what Fitzgerald put into it. Huntly McCarthy, who was 
only in our house once or twice, did, of course, actually make 
a translation of the Rubaiyat, but he is a literary marvel 
who has not yet come into his own, author of exquisite poems, 
and of some of the most brilliant and delightful historical 
novels by any living writer. His father, the genial leader 
of the Home Rule Party, who loved Ireland without hating 
England, and wrote history blindfolded to prejudice, that 
grand old man, Justin McCarthy, was a much more frequent 
visitor. I can see him now, with his long beard, and eloquent 
Irish eyes behind very conspicuous glasses, leaning on his 
daughter Charlotte, and I can hear his rich brogue. It was a 
great honour to be admitted to the intimate friendship of 
Justin McCarthy, and when he grew more infirm, and went 
to die at Westgate, where he lived on for a surprising 
time, he never failed to remember me with a line at 
Christmas. 

I ought to mention Oscar Wilde here, who had a wonderful 
gift of poetical expression, and whom I met when we were 
both undergraduates at Oxford, where he used to call himself 



THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 109 

O. O'F. Wills Wilde— Oscar O'Flaherty Wills Wilde. He 
was always known as Wills Wilde. 

But our parties were too crowded for him ; he pref ered to 
come to see me on a chance afternoon, like Lewis Morris. 
He hated having people introduced to him, until he had 
expressed the desire that they should have the honour, and 
in meetings so Bohemian he could not have escaped it. He 
took a scholarship at Oxford, and won the University prize 
for the English poem, and I rather think he got a First Class, 
but one did not think of him dans cette galere. He had, 
even in those days, a desire to be conspicuous, and in those 
days aestheticism pranced through the land. Garments of 
funny-coloured green baize, with a Greek absence of any 
pretence at dressmaking, were the badge of the aesthetic 
female, who to take first prize was required to have red hair 
and green eyes, and a mouth like a magenta foxglove. And 
the idea was that men should wear black velvet knickerbocker 
suits, with silk stockings and black velvet caps like pancakes. 
I never saw them doing it, except in an aesthetic pottery 
shop in the Queen's Road, Bayswater, where they sold 
Aspinall's enamels, and on the stage, where Gilbert and 
Sullivan's Patience took the place now occupied by works 
of genius like Bernard Shaw's Chocolate Soldier. Wilde never 
wore the dress at Oxford, but he was quite courageous in 
adjuncts. At one time he banished all the decorations from 
his rooms, except a single blue vase of the true aesthetic type 
which contained a " Patience " lily. He was discovered by 
the other undergraduates of Magdalen prostrated with grief 
before it because he never could live up to it. They did 
what they could to revive him by putting him under the 
college pump. 

But they applauded his wit, at the coining of a famous 
example of which I was privileged to be present. We were 
both in for a Divinity exam, at the same time. There was no 
Honour school in Divinity ; it was simply a qualifying exam, 
to show that we had sufficient knowledge of the rudiments 
of the religion of the Church of England to be graduates 
of a religious university; we used to call the exam. " Rudi- 
ments " for short. 



110 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

I went to the exam., like a good young man, at the adver- 
tised hour, nine o'clock; Wilde did not arrive till half-an-hour 
later, and when Spooner, the Head of New College, who was 
one of our examiners, asked him what he meant by being 
so late, he said, " You must excuse me ; I have no experience 
of these pass examinations." 

It was the morning of the viva voce examinations, and his 
being late did not really signify because W is one of the 
last letters in the alphabet. But the examiners were so 
annoyed at his impertinence that they gave him a Bible, 
and told him to copy out the long twenty-seventh chapter 
of the Acts, He copied it out so industriously in his exquisite 
handwriting that their hearts relented, and they told him 
that he need not write out any more. Half-an-hour afterwards 
they noticed that he was copying it out as hard as ever, and 
they called him up to say, " Didn't you hear us tell you, 
Mr. Wilde, that you needn't copy out any more? " 

" Oh yes," he said, " I heard you, but I was so interested 
in what I was copying, that I could not leave off. It was all 
about a man named Paul, who went on a voyage, and was 
caught in a terrible storm, and I was afraid that he would 
be drowned, but, do you know, Mr. Spooner, he was saved, 
and when I found that he was saved, I thought of coming to 
tell you." 

As Mr. Spooner was nephew of the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, the insult was of a peculiarly aggravating nature, and 
he ploughed him then and there. As my name also came 
low down in the alphabet, I was a witness of the whole 
performance. 

Herbert Trench, the poet, who, when he became a theatrical 
manager, discovered the " Blue Bird," often came, a very 
handsome Irishman of the blue-eyed and black-haired type. 
I met him when he and I were fellow members of the House 
Committee which discussed the poorness of the dinners at 
the old Authors' Club. 

Frederick Langbridge, the charming poet, who was joint 
author of Martin Harvey's evergreen " Only Way," only 
came once or twice, because, like Dean Swift, he was exiled 
by an Irish preferment. He is Rector of Limerick. 



THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 111 

Wilde once brought a friend with him, whose name was 
Barlass. He wrote poetry which Wilde admired, though it 
had no market, and claimed to be a descendant of the 
Katherine Douglas who barred the door with her arm when 
the bolt had been stolen, to save King James III of Scotland 
from his murderers, and was nicknamed Katherine Barlass. 
I have a volume of his poems still, but the thing I remember 
best about him was an episode which happened when we 
were both at Wilde's house in Tite Street one day. Upstairs 
in the drawing-room he had asked Wilde, " What do you think 
of George Meredith's novels ? " 

Wilde, having nothing effective to say at the moment, 
appeared not to hear him. But as he was going out of the 
front door, he said, " George Meredith is a sort of prose 
Browning," and when Barlass was halfway down Tite Street, 
he called after him, " And Browning also is a sort of prose 
Browning." 

Bliss Carman wrote some of the most delightful poetry 
of them all. Born in Canada, where they have eternal 
sunshine in summer, and brought up in those parts of the 
Maritime provinces where little mountains and little lakes 
and little rivers and little forests combine with a bold coastline 
to make Acadia an Arcady, it was only natural that he should 
be able to transfigure in his poems the Old World Arcady, 
with Pan, Faun, Syrinx and Adonis, and all the lovely rabble 
of mountain, sea and woodland nymphs. 

Carman could write from a typical Canadian inspiration 
also. He could make you see Grandpre, and the lives of 
the men who won Canada from the wilds and maintained a 
seignorial grace of life in the new France, which was born 
in the days of the Roi Soleil, and lived under the white flag 
till it went down in the glorious sunset on the heights of 
Abraham. Carman's poetry is rich in romance, and he was 
a romantic figure, for with his great stature and fair hair, 
and blue eyes, he looked as if he might have been one of the 
Norsemen led to the far north of the continent by Leif, the 
son of Erik, a thousand years ago, whose descendants were 
discovered roaming in the Arctic only the other day. As a 
matter of fact, he was descended from one of the most famous 



112 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

men among the United Empire loyalists, who left the 
United States when they could no longer live there under the 
British flag, and gave Canada her unconquerable backbone. 

I should have mentioned ere this two dear friends of ours 
who are both dead — William Sharp and Gleeson White. 
White was one of my oldest literary friends. We knew him 
when we were living at Richmond before we went to America, 
and saw a lot of him during the three years we were 
there. We came home, I think, just before him. William 
Sharp introduced him to us. Sharp, who was the friend of 
nearly every well-known author of his time, began life as 
poet and critic. As general editor of the " Canterbury Poets," 
his name is a household word. There was no wider-minded 
critic, none who had a wider knowledge of the poetry and 
other verses of his day. But his chief contribution to liter- 
ature consisted of the works of " Fiona Macleod," which 
were never acknowledged as his during his lifetime, though he 
never denied their authorship to me. We saw him frequently, 
not only at Addison Mansions, but abroad, for, like ourselves, 
he was an insatiable wanderer over Italy and Sicily. 

Gleeson White did not write much verse himself, but he 
edited a volume of society verses under the title of Ballades 
and Rondeaux, in the " Canterbury Poets," which had a 
really public effect. It collected the best examples of the 
ballades and rondeaux, and verse in other old French forms, 
written by Gosse and Dobson, and Lang, and other well- 
known writers, in such a convenient form, and gave the 
rules for writing them so clearly, that everybody who had 
any skill in versifying set to work to write ballades and ron- 
deaux, and bombard the magazines and newspapers with 
them. There was a rage of ballade-writing which can only 
be compared to the limerick competitions of Pearson's Weekly. 
Of Gleeson White's accomplishments as an art critic I have 
spoken elsewhere. 

Edgar Fawcett, the New Yorker who was so often at our 
parties on both sides of the Atlantic, was one of the best 
American writers of ballades, though thousands of American 
writers, according to the sardonic Miss Gilder, turned them 
out by machinery. 



THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 113 

Sharp himself was more inchned to the sonnet, as was our 
mutual friend, Theodore Watts (now Watts-Dunton), who 
lived with Swinburne at the Pines, Putney, and will always 
be remembered as Swinburne's greatest friend. Watts's 
sonnets in the Athenceum became as well known to literary 
people as Dr. Watts's hymns. They were among the best 
sonnets of the day. Watts was Swinburne's companion 
on his famous swimming excursions. Like the matchless 
poet who refused the laureateship, he was a magnificent 
swimmer. 

Hall Caine was at that time the chief authority upon the 
sonnet, as he was one of the chief literary critics of the 
Athenxum and the Academy. He gave me about that time 
his Sonnets of Three Centuries, which I still keep. 

Two other followers of the Muse who came to our parties 
were Mackenzie Bell and Norman Gale. 

Adrian Ross — Arthur Reed Ropes — who so long carried 
on a dual literary life — a Fellow of King's, an Examiner to 
the University, and writer of text-books at Cambridge, while 
he wrote the songs for George Edwardes's musical comedies 
in London, was a friend of ours before he came to live in 
Addison Mansions, partly, I believe, because we lived there. 
He is an amazingly clever man ; his general knowledge is extra- 
ordinary. He took various 'varsity scholarships and prizes at 
Cambridge and was the ablest of the clever journalists with 
whom Clement Shorter surrounded himself for his great move. 
He may also fairly claim to be W. S. Gilbert's successor as 
a writer of really witty and scholarly songs (which have also 
been amazingly popular) for the principal musical comedies 
from A Greek Slave till the present day. Adrian Ross, 
who is a Russian by birth, looks like a Russian with his big, 
burly form, and fair beard and glasses, when you see him 
taking the chair at some feast of reason like the Omar Khay- 
yam Club. He is one of the chief Omarians, and might, if 
he devoted himself to it, write just such a poem as Fitzgerald's 
" Rubaiyat " himself, for he has the gift of form, the wit, 
and the width of knowledge, to draw upon. In the same 
way, if he had been born early enough, he would have written 
some of our best ballades and rondeaux. There, in addition 
I 



114 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

to his extraordinary facility, he had the advantage of being 
one of the best-read men in England on French literature, 
and one of the chief authorities upon it. He married Ethel 
Wood, an actress as clever as she is pretty, who, if she 
acted more, would be one of our most successful character- 
actresses. 

Rowland Thirlmere was another dual personality. When 
he came to see us at Addison Mansions he was Rowland 
Thirlmere the poet, literary to his finger-tips; when he was 
at home at Bury he was John Walker, a Lancashire cotton- 
mill manager, an ardent Conservative politician, a " Wake 
up, England ! " man. Did he not write The Clash of Empires, 
a classic on the German peril ? 

Douglas Ainslie, the poet of the Stuarts, who has now 
established for himself a solid reputation in Philosophy, was 
still a diplomat when he first used to come to see us. 

We had not so many poetesses. The chief of them was 
Lady Lindsay, whose In a Venetian Gondola went through 
many editions, a poetess of the same order and rank as the 
Hon. Mrs. Norton a generation before. Her poetry was 
strengthened by sincere piety and morality. They gave it 
the mysterious quality which attracts us in the old Sienese 
pictures. 

Among the younger poetesses who came to us, two stood 
out— Ethel Clifford, Mrs. W. K. Clifford's daughter, who 
married Fisher Dilke, and Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall. 

The charm of Mrs. Dilke's poetry is universally admitted, 
but Miss Hall's has not yet received anything like the recog- 
nition which it deserves. 

She is a step-daughter of the famous musician, Albert 
Visetti, and much younger than any of the others. To see 
her, even to speak with her, one would think that she thought 
more of her hunting-box and her horses than of abstractions 
like poetry. At the time when I first met her, her winters 
were equally divided between travelling and hunting, and 
she appears to have gathered inspiration from both of these 
sources. Her outdoor life in one of our most beautiful 
counties has given her a deep love and appreciation of the 
country pleasures only to be found in England. There is 



THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 115 

no one I know who writes more from inspiration. I reviewed 
her first book, 'Twixt Earth and Stars, with real enthusiasm. 
Since then she has pubhshed A Sheaf of Verses, Poems of the 
Past and Present, and Songs of Three Counties and Other 
Poems. Of these three volumes, Poems of the Past and the 
Present shows her at her best. 

Visetti was born a Dalmatian, but he has for thirty years 
been a British subject — and a very patriotic British subject. 
He had the celebrated composer, Arrigo Boito, for a fellow- 
student at the Conservatoire at Milan. An even greater 
composer, Auber, introduced him to the splendid court of 
the third Napoleon. Dumas pere wrote a libretto for him. 
He was AdeUna Patti's musical adviser for five years, and 
wrote " La Diva " for her. He was admitted to the personal 
friendship of both the late King Edward and the late Duke 
of Edinburgh. He was the first professor appointed to the 
staff of the Royal College of Music. He has written lives 
of Palestrina and Verdi. 

" Dolly Radford," a writer of delicate and sympathetic 
verse, and her husband, Ernest Radford, used to come to 
us in those days. So, very occasionally, did two Irish 
poetesses, Mrs. Shorter and Katherine Tynan. The former, 
wife of the editor of the Sphere, has won herself an assured 
position by Celtic ballads of a highly imaginative order. 
She is Yeats's closest rival. 

I first met Mrs. Clement Shorter when she was staying 
with Miss Katherine Tynan (Mrs. Hinkson) at Ealing, where 
Shorter first met her. Mrs. Hinkson thus recalls Miss Dora 
Sigerson, as she was then, in her Reminiscences — 

" I was the means of introducing Dora some years later to 
Mr. Clement Shorter, whom she married. 

" We were all possessed with the common impulse towards 
literature. We were all making our poems and stories. Dora 
Sigerson, who was then a strikingly handsome girl, was 
painting as well, making statuettes and busts, doing all sorts 
of things, and looking like a young Muse. Dr. Sigerson was, 
as he is happily doing to-day, dispensing the most delightful 
hospitality. His Sunday-night dinners were, and are, a 
feature of literary life in Dublin, chiefly of the literary life 



116 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

which has the colour of the green. At the time there was 
no Irish Literary Society, as there is now, with Dr. Sigerson 
for its President. The best of the young intellect of Dublin 
was to be found at Dr. Sigerson's board." 

Mrs. Shorter has written several volumes of poetry, one 
with an introduction by George Meredith, novels and short 
stories. She also still paints in oils, and models ; her country 
garden at Great Missenden has many examples of her talent 
in this direction. 

Mrs. Shorter's poetry has an ample range. Some of her 
ballads are pitiful tragedies, told with a delicate sense of 
ballad simplicity, and an exquisite ear for the broken music 
which is so essential to ballads ; and, at the other end of the 
gamut, she can also write songs in a lighter vein that deserve 
a composer like Bishop to set them to music— such songs as 
the poem called " The Spies " in her Madge Linsey volume. 

Katherine Tynan, who had married H. A. Hinkson before 
we ever met personally, though years earlier she had given 
me introductions to Louise Imogen Guiney, the American 
poetess, and other valued friends among the writers in America, 
is the author of short lyrics, human and graceful, which ought 
to find a permanent place in our anthologies, as well as a 
popular novelist, and has lately written a charming volume 
of her Reminiscences. 

I have left Sir Edwin Arnold, Thomas Hardy and W. E. 
Henley to the end of this chapter. Arnold, whom I used to 
see daily when we were both living in Tokyo, was too infirm 
to come to us much in Addison Mansions in his last days. 

While he was in Japan, he lived in a native house in Azabu 
outside Treaty limits, receiving permission to do so under 
the legal fiction that he was tutor to the daughters of the 
wealthy Japanese who lent him the house under a similar 
fiction. It was just outside the Azabu Temple, a favourite 
resort for holiday-makers, and had delightful bamboo- 
brakes, which rustled rhythm to Arnold in his garden. 
The house had its proper paraphernalia of shifting wooden 
and paper shutters, thick padded mats of primrose straw, 
flat cushions to kneel on, flat quilts to sleep on, tobacco- 
stoves, finger-stoves and kakemonos. It was so native that 



THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 117 

you always had to take off your boots when you went to see 
him. Here he wrote the Light of the World, and he used to 
read it to me batch by batch as he finished it. His manu- 
script was most edifying; he wrote a beautiful scholarly 
hand, full of character, rather like the hand of Lanfranc, 
who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of William 
the Conqueror. He did very little sight-seeing or bargaining. 
His time was taken up with receiving Buddhist abbots and 
the sages who, by extraordinary abstinence and striking 
concentrations of mind and will, had acquired supernatural 
powers, just as Hall Caine used to see the leading Mohamme- 
dan ulema in Egypt. They had a profound respect for 
him. I always fancy that Arnold had in his mind some 
magnum opus on those Eastern superhumans, which he never 
gave to the world. He wrote a good deal of poetry in those 
days besides the Light of the World, chiefly translations, 
adaptations and imitations of the Hokku and other Japanese 
forms of verse, in which he excelled. He not only had the 
natural charm, he could put his mind on an Eastern plane 
of thought. He looked quite Oriental when he was in 
Japanese dress; his dark skin, his Oriental type, the deep 
reserve which lay behind his affability, all suggested the child 
of the East. 

Thomas Hardy (who honoured us with his presence very 
rarely) I must mention in this context as a poet and not as 
a novelist, though he is the head of the novelists' craft to-day, 
undoubtedly. I am not certain that he is not also our truest 
living poet, except Kipling. He has certainly come nearer 
to finding a new poetical form than any modern poet except 
Yone Noguchi, the marvellous Japanese, who has written 
some of the finest contemporary poetry in our language, 
for Walt Whitman's psalm forms are not suited for any 
country but America, or for any writer who is not one of the 
people working with his hands. His crudities would not be 
tolerable in an educated man. But Hardy struck out entirely 
fresh forms. Hardy shook off the ancient trammels of rhyme 
and metre, while preserving a rich rhythm and a scholarly 
elegance, in poems inspired with a broad humanity. 

Henley, who, like Gray, wrote a few gems, which will find 



118 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

their place in every anthology, was never in our flat at Addison 
Mansions, though he was a friend of mine ; he could not have 
climbed so many stairs if he had tried. 

I remember two sayings of his specially. In those days 
I wrote verses ; and he was good enough to read my books of 
verse and advise me on them. He said there was some hope 
for me because I wrote short pieces, and, in his opinion, the 
perfect poem should never contain more than three stanzas. 
But I have long since abandoned verse writing. 

The other was a thing which he said to me when he was 
giving me some introductions, on the eve of my departure for 
America. I thought it was a joke then, but subsequent events 
threw a light on it. He was urging me after I left America 
to go on and see Stevenson at Samoa. He said that Stevenson 
would be my inspiration, and as he was handing me the 
introduction he said to me, with what I considered unneces- 
sary emphasis, " And when you see him, tell the beggar that 
I hate him for being so beastly successful." 

Years afterwards Henley wrote of Stevenson with an 
acidity which his friends regretted very much, and which 
proved to me that what he had said to me as we were parting 
was one of those outbursts of candour for which Henley was 
famous. 

It required a big man like Henley to confess that he was 
envious, and perhaps there was good reason why he should 
be, for considering the way their careers began, and Henley's 
magnificent intellect and gift of expression, one would not 
have prophesied in the beginning that Henley would only 
be appreciated by the critical few, and Stevenson by all the 
world, gentle and simple. 

I never did see Stevenson. We meant to have taken Samoa 
on our way back from Japan to San Francisco, but the 
Japanese boat which should have taken us there broke down, 
and we could not wait for the next. 



CHAPTER XI 

LADY AUTHORS AT ADDISON MANSIONS 

The great " Miss Braddon," who is now one of the most 
valued of my friends, and a not infrequent visitor, never 
came to 32 Addison Mansions. She achieved fame before 
any Hving novehst. She had pubUshed Aurora Floyd and 
Lady Audley's Secret more than half a century ago, in 1862, 
while Thomas Hardy did not write Under the Greenwood 
Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes till ten years after that. Her 
powers are undiminished. Her Green Curtain, published 
fifty years later, is one of the finest books she ever wrote. 

Nor did I ever meet Miss M. G. Tuttiett, who, since she 
wrote her great Silence of Dean Maitland, has been known 
to all the world as " Maxwell Gray," until I became her 
neighbour at Richmond. These lost years have deprived 
me of a great pleasure, because, apart from my admiration 
for her novels, I share two of her hobbies — her enthusiasm 
for her garden and her enthusiasm for Italy. 

I used to esteem it an honour and a privilege when dear 
old Mrs. Alexander — Mrs. Hector was her real name — used 
to toil up the stairs to our parties. Her books were de- 
lightful, and she was one of the earliest of my literary friends, 
for I met her at Louise Chandler Moulton's before I went to 
America. 

Still more, on account of her infirmity, did I appreciate 
it when Mrs. Lynn Linton came. My intimacy with her 
arose from two facts. When my novel, A Japanese Marriage^ 
came out, she wrote to me in the warmest terms about it. 
She not only was enthusiastic about it as a novel, but thought 
it an unanswerable piece of advocacy for the relief of the 
Deceased Wife's Sister (now happily accomplished). After 
that I was a frequent visitor at her flat in Queen Anne's 

119 



120 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Mansions, and later we met as fellow-guests at Malfitano, 
the beautiful villa of Mr. and Mrs. J. J. S. Whitaker at 
Palermo. She looked the grande dame, and she was a 
great woman as well as a great writer, admired in both 
capacities by all the great writers of her day, which was a 
long one — long enough to include Walter Savage Landor. 
Her championing of A Japanese Marriage came as a very 
complete surprise to me, because she was noted for severity 
as a moralist, and the marriage of the hero and the heroine 
by the American Consul, after the clergy had refused to 
marry them, in the eye of the Law was no marriage at all, 
since neither of them was an American subject — it was a 
mere manifesto that they meant to live together as man and 
wife. That letter of hers was the beginning of one of my 
most delightful friendships. 

I don't remember when I first met Mrs. Croker or Mrs. 
Perrin or Flora Annie Steel, though they have all been 
valued friends for many years. As they are all Anglo- 
Indians, I suppose that I must have met one of them through 
some member of my family in the Indian Army or Indian 
Civil Service, and the others through her. My family have 
been much connected with India. To mention only two of 
them, my cousin. General John Sladen, was a brother-in-law 
of Lord Roberts, and actually kept house with him in India 
for a year, and his brother. Sir Edward Sladen, was the 
British resident who played so great a part in Burmah, and 
whose statue has the place of honour in the Burmese capital. 

Of one thing I am certain, that the marriage of Mrs. 
Croker's beautiful daughter — the belle of Dublin — to one 
of the Palermo Whitakers, was not the introduction, for 
Mrs. Croker has never been to Palermo, and I remember her 
asking me all about the Whitakers' famous gardens in Sicily. 
Captain Whitaker did not live there; he was with his 
regiment. 

It is natural to mention Mrs. Steel, Mrs. Perrin and Mrs. 
Croker together, for they long divided the Indian Empire 
with Rudyard Kipling as a realm of fiction. Each in her 
own department is supreme. 

In the days when we first knew her, and she was living 



LADY AUTHORS 121 

in Ireland, it used to be like a ray of sunshine when pretty 
Mrs. Croker, with her blue eyes and her bright colour and 
her delightful Irish tongue, paid one of her rare visits to 
London. As I write these words, I am about to pay a visit 
to her in her Folkestone home. She is exactly the type you 
would expect from her irresistible books. 

When I asked Mrs. Croker what first gave her the idea of 
writing, she said — 

" My very first attempt at writing was in the hot weather 
at Secunderabad. When my husband was away tiger- 
shooting, and I was more or less a prisoner all day owing 
to the heat, I began a story, solely for my own amusement. 
It grew day by day, and absorbed all my time and interest. 
This was Proper Pride. With reluctance and trepidation 
I read it to a friend, and then to all the other ladies in the 
regiment — under seal of secrecy. Emboldened by this 
success, I wrote Pretty Miss Neville, and when I returned 
home with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, I had two manuscripts 
among my luggage. These went the usual round, but at 
the end of a year I received a small offer for Proper Pride. 
It came out in August 1892, without my name, and was 
immediately successful — principally owing to long and 
appreciative notices in The Times and Saturday Review, 
both on the same day. Three editions went off in a month, 
and I must confess that no one was as much surprised by 
this success as I was. Subsequently I sold the copyright of 
Pretty Miss Neville for one hundred pounds, and though now 
a lady of thirty, she still sells, in cheap editions, I attribute 
my good fortune to the fact that my novels struck a new 
note — India and army society — and that I received very 
powerful help from unknown reviewers. I like writing, 
otherwise I could not work. I believe I inherit the taste 
from my father's family, who were said to be ' born with a 
pen in their hands ' ! " Mrs. Croker tells me that it was I 
who first introduced her to London literary society. I con- 
sider this one of the most charming successes of my literary 
career. 

Mrs. Perrin, on the other hand, since she came back from 
India, has played a continuously prominent part in London 



122 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

literary life. She has been a leading figure at literary clubs 
and receptions, and has been a pillar of " the Women 
Journalists." As story-teller and psychologist combined, 
she has no superior. Those of her wide public who know her 
in private life know a brilliant and charming woman of the 
world, with a proved capacity for managing literary affairs. 

When I asked Mrs. Perrin what started her in a literary 
career, she said — 

" I think I took to writing from sheer need of occupation. 
When I married my husband in India, as a girl of eighteen, 
we were sent to a place in the jungle where he had charge 
of an enormous aqueduct which was under construction. 
He had several Coopers Hill assistants under him, not one 
of whom was married, and I was the only English woman 
in the locality. There was no station — or permanent settle- 
ment; our houses were temporary erections of mud, and 
we were miles from the railway. The landscape consisted 
of a sea of yellow grass about the height of a man, and there 
was only one road, which lay behind our bungalow — the 
grand trunk road that is the backbone of India. I began 
to write here, just to amuse myself, and then when we went 
to less isolated spots, I gained confidence and used to send 
little articles and turn-overs to the Pioneer — the principal 
Indian daily paper. These were nearly always accepted, 
and so I took courage and wrote a novel called Into 
Temptation, which ran through that prehistoric magazine 
London Society, long ago defunct. The book came out in 
two volumes and had very fair notices. Then I wrote 
another called Late in Life, which ran serially in an Indian 
weekly, off-shoot of the Pioneer, and in England through 
the Belgravia, and then came out in two volumes. So you 
may imagine — or rather, realise — how long ago I began ! 
Both these novels are now to appear revised and corrected 
in Messrs. Methuen's 7d. series. 

" However, I did not receive the financial encouragement 
I had hoped for from these first efforts, and I lost heart. 
For nearly ten years I wrote nothing but a few Indian short 
stories. Then when my husband was offered an appoint- 
ment at home, and we retired before we had ' done ' our 



LADY AUTHORS 123 

full time in India, I collected these stories, and they came 
out under the title of East of Suez. The book was a success 
and since then I have written and have been published 
steadily. 

" I am deeply interested in India, in the people and their 
religions, and histories and social systems, and as I was 
sixteen years in the country I had an opportunity of receiving 
lasting impressions, and of gaining invaluable experience. 
I come of a family which has been officially connected with 
India for five generations. My great grandfather was with 
Lord Cornwallis, on his staff, at the taking of Seringapatam, 
and the surrender to Lord Cornwallis of Tippoo Sahib's two 
little sons as hostages. He was afterwards Chairman of the 
old East India Company — known in those days as John 
Company. 

" I cannot think of anything more anecdotal in my 
experience as a novelist — I can only remember the dis- 
appointments and the difficulties of what success I have 
made, at which, perhaps, I may now bring myself to smile, 
but I do not think they would be interesting if related ! " 

A few years ago Mrs. Steel was also one of the most 
prominent figures in London literary society. She had 
written On the Face of the Waters, one of the finest historical 
novels in the language; she was a hard and earnest worker 
in all sorts of movements, and as a fighting speaker there 
were few to match her. She could make a good set speech, 
but her set speeches were nothing to the oratory of which 
she was capable if, when she was totally unprepared, in- 
dignation stung her into springing to her feet to denounce 
the offender. Then her words came as blows come from a 
man who hits another man because he is incensed beyond 
endurance. A face full of life and expression added force 
to her words. 

Since Mrs. Steel settled down on an estate in Wales, she 
has been little in London. But in those days she had a 
sort of country-house on the Netting Hill slope of Campden 
Hill. She is a keen politician, and not long ago sold the 
opening page of On the Face of the Waters as her subscription 
to the Women's Cause. 



124 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Another author lost to London is Sarah Grand. She used 
to be our neighbour ; she shared a flat in the Abingdon Road 
with her step-son, Haldane McFall, the art critic, and author 
of that remarkable novel, The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer. 
I met her soon after the success of The Heavenly Twins— a, 
young woman with indignant blue eyes, very reserved, but 
with a rare charm of manner behind her reserve. I was 
introduced to her, I think, by Heinemann, who was often 
at our at-homes. He had, as I understood, purchased The 
Heavenly Twins from her ready printed, copyright and all 
for a hundred pounds, but when the success came had torn 
up the agreement, and substituted a royalty agreement, 
paying the royalties from the beginning. She had already, 
I gathered, received twelve times the original sum in royalties. 

Alfred Walford often came to see us — his wife, Mrs. L. B. 
Walford, more occasionally, since she was the mother of a 
large family as well as many books, and they lived in Essex. 
Alfred Walford used to chaff himself about his connection 
with literature being to produce the paper on which it was 
printed. He was a paper-maker; and she, at that time, 
was the favourite novelist of the Colonies. She was the 
daughter of that Colquhoun of Luss who wrote that famous 
book The Moor and the Loch. 

The gentle-faced " Miss Thackeray," the great novelist's 
daughter, now the widow of Sir Richmond Ritchie, I did not 
know in those days, but I used to meet her afterwards at 
Lady Lindsay's. There was a time when her Old Kensington 
was my favourite novel. 

And here I must say something about my old and dear 
friend. Lady Lindsay, who has so recently passed away, and 
whose lameness prevented her from toiling up the stairs to 
our at-homes very often. For many years I was constantly 
at her house, both at her famous dinner-parties and running 
in to have a talk about books when I was sure of finding her 
alone, for she was good enough to be much interested in my 
work. 

The daughter of a Cabinet Minister, the Right Hon. 
Henry Fitzroy (son of the first Lord Southampton), a 
descendant of Nathan Meyer de Rothschild, who founded 




\ J>~ 



"MISS BRADDON" 

Drawn by Yosliio Markino 



LADY AUTHORS 125 

the fortunes of his House, and sister-in-law of the Loyd 
Lindsay, V.C, who became Lord Wantage, she knew nearly 
every noted person of her time, and those whom she did not 
know, she generally could have known but for some prejudice 
against them. At her dinner-parties you met men like 
Tennyson and Gladstone and Layard of Nineveh — great 
politicians, great nobles, great authors, great painters, but 
hardly any one from the theatrical world. I was nearly 
always the least important person present. Eight was her 
favourite number, though sometimes there were a dozen 
at her famous round table. The conversation used to be 
brilliant ; the company was arranged with a view to that — 
naturally the chief guest often got possession of the table, 
and we sat and chronicled the historic scene in our hearts. 

Afterwards, when one went up into the drawing-room, 
our eyes rested on pictures by Sandro Botticelli and Titian, 
sixteenth-century Italian wedding-chests, and other in- 
heritances of the great. She wrote more than one volume 
of poems which went into several editions. 

It is natural to mention beside her another great lady who 
was in touch with all the notabilities of her time, Walpole's 
descendant, Lady Dorothy Nevill, who married a descendant 
of Warwick the Kingmaker's elder brother, the Baron of Aber- 
gavenny. Her husband was at one time the heir-presump- 
tive of the Marquis of Abergavenny. She happily gave her 
reminiscences to the world, as Lady Lindsay always meant 
to do, so readers know her connections, though she was too 
modest to show how Disraeli leaned upon her advice. Among 
the most interesting things which I remember in her house 
in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, were the unique memen- 
toes of her ancestor, the tremendous Sir Robert Walpole, the 
Asquith of the eighteenth century. It was she who told me 
that Nelson was called Horatio because Horace Walpole 
presented his father to the living of Burnham Thorpe, which 
is still in the gift of the Earls of Orford. 

Lady St. Helier, another great London hostess, at whose 
house I have met some of the most celebrated people of the 
day — Lady St. Helier and her daughter, Mrs. Allhusen, never 
came to see us till we had left Addison Mansions for the 



126 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Avenue House, Richmond. No woman has been more 
integrally a part of the life of her time than Lady St. Helier, 
who wrote an admirable volume of reminiscences. Mrs. 
Allhusen has the inspiration of owning a house where one of 
the masterpieces of literature was written — Gray's Elegy. 
For the house in which Gray wrote it after the inspiration, 
which came to him as he was leaning over the gate of Stoke 
Poges Churchyard, has been enlarged into Stoke Court, and 
the room in which Gray wrote out the Elegy forms part of 
Mrs. Allhusen's writing-room. 

Marie Corelli, like Hall Caine, has a dislike of literary 
receptions. I cannot remember if she ever came to Addison 
Mansions, though we have been friends for many years, and 
I remember going to brilliant dinner-parties at her house 
in Longridge Road. Her stepfather, Charles Mackay, who 
adopted her, was one of my earliest literary friends. 

Her stepbrother, Eric Mackay, author of the famous 
Love-letters of a Violinist, lived with her, and he came to our 
at-homes so frequently that I think she must have come with 
him sometimes. They were a very musical family. It is 
always said that Marie Corelli, had she so chosen, could have 
won as much fame in music as she has in literature. Her 
books illustrate Hall Caine' s axiom that the greatest novels 
are those which deal with the elemental facts of human 
nature. Her grasp of human nature has won her countless 
readers in both hemispheres. 

It is not universally known that Marie Corelli is an 
admirable speaker — so lucid, so convincing, able by perfect 
elocution to reach the furthest corner of the large hall of 
the Hotel Cecil without raising her voice. Though she 
lives at Stratford-on-Avon, and is identified with all its 
functions, she is frequently to be seen in London at places 
like Ranelagh or dancing at the great balls at the Albert 
Hall. 

Almost alone of the chief lady novelists of that time, 
Mrs. Humphry Ward was never at Addison Mansions. 
The most interesting thing I remember in conversation with 
her was her confession to me one day when we were at Mrs. 
W. K. Clifford's that she enjoys handling the character of a 



LADY AUTHORS 127 

person who is a failure better than the character of a person 
who achieves success. Heroes apparently do not appeal to 
her. 

Mrs. W. K. Clifford was often at Addison Mansions. She 
is a very old friend of mine, and a great personality. Mrs. 
Clifford is an admirable example of the modern woman, 
breezy, wholesome, warm-hearted, clear-visioned, lucid in 
expression, interested in all questions of the day, and withal 
one of our best novelists. Early in life she suffered a 
loss which would have overwhelmed most women, for she 
lost her husband, Prof. W. K. Chfford, F.R.S., who was 
already reckoned the third mathematician in Europe, at the 
same age as Wolfe fell at Quebec, thirty-three, when they 
had only been married four years, and she was still a girl. 
He was the most brilliant Fellow of Trinity (Cambridge) of 
his day, and the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society. 
There is nothing he could not have done and would not have 
done if he had lived, for there was no side of life which did 
not appeal to him. People of every rank and of every shade 
of thought came to see him, and no matter how little they 
agreed with him, they were always hypnotised for the hour. 

He had wonderful dark-lashed lalue eyes, like his daughter, 
and a wonderful soul seemed to be looking out of them. 

But she did not allow her loss to prostrate her, and she 
has lived to see her house one of the Meccas of literature 
in London, and her daughter, Mrs. Fisher Dilke, a recognised 
poetess. 

Talking of Mrs. Clifford reminds me of the chequered 
career of The Love-letters of a Worldly Woman. It was 
published just twenty years ago, and though the first edition 
sold out immediately, no second edition was published in 
England, but in America, where it was non-copyright, it 
sold enormously. There were a dozen pirate editions of it, 
including a marked edition, which means one with the most 
popular passages indicated. Such a height of popularity did 
it reach that it was actually sold at street-corners in New 
York ! But I have heard that Mrs. Clifford only got fifteen 
pounds royalties off the whole dozen editions. 

The first batch of love-letters in this volume appeared 



128 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

anonymously in the Fortnightly, and were generally attributed 
to Oscar Wilde. As a piece of poetical justice when Hous- 
man's An English-woman's Love-letters were published seven 
years later, they were attributed to Mrs. Clifford. The Love- 
letters of a Worldly Woman was a remarkable book, and fully 
deserved its American popularity. 

Mrs. Clifford is, above all things, an idealist and a lover 
of good work. She has said, in one of her books, " in good 
love and good work lie the chance of immortality for every- 
thing that is worth having or being; and yet, though I've 
aimed at the sun, and longed to put into the beautiful world 
something worthy of it, I have never hit higher than a goose- 
berry bush, or achieved anything that gave me satisfaction. 
And I've been so full of enthusiasms and dreams . . . perhaps 
one of the dreams will come true some day — who knows? 
For if I live to be ninety, I shall still feel, as I do now, that 
the soul of me is as young and fresh as ever ; and it is a sense 
of the beauty of things, of the kindness that underlies human 
nature, even when it's choked with weeds at the top, that 
gives one courage, and helps one to do." 

Beside Mrs. Clifford I should mention Margaret Woods, 
whom I first met when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, 
and her husband, the present Master of the Temple, was my 
tutor, engaged to her while I was his pupil. I remember 
his asking me and other undergraduates to meet her in his 
rooms. I do not think he told us why, but we knew. She 
was one of the few charming women that the monastic 
Oxford of that day contained. Her father, afterwards the 
famous Dean of Westminster, was master of University 
College; I used to go to his Socrates lectures. He was dis- 
satisfied with the progress we were making, and boldly — it 
was very bold at Oxford — charged us with paying too much 
attention to athletics, and it was then that he made his 
famous mot, that he had never taken any exercise in his life, 
except by occasionally standing up when he was reading. 
I have heard that it is equally true of Mr. Chamberlain, but 
it was Dean Bradley who said it. The Bradleys were an 
excessively clever family. The Dean had a brother or a half- 
brother a great philosopher, a don at Merton, and another. 



LADY AUTHORS 129 

Andrew Bradley, a Fellow at Balliol, who became Professor 
of Literature at another University. I forget what his sister, 
Emma Bradley, did, but she was famous. Three of his 
daughters, Mrs. Woods, Mrs. Birchenough, Mrs. Murray 
Smith, are authoresses, Mrs. Woods being one of the best 
novelists of the day, and in my opinion the best of all poetesses 
in the English language. When Tennyson died there was a 
movement in favour of her being made the laureate, and no 
woman has ever had such claims for the post. She made 
her mark very young with A Village Tragedy and Esther 
Vanhomrigh, and has written notable books ever since. 
Beautiful workmanship, singularly broad humanity, and 
truth to life are the characteristics of her prose. In poetry 
she has the gifts of both Brownings. She lives in an ideal 
home, the panelled Master's House at the Temple, which 
has, however, one drawback, that the only way out of it to 
a cab on a wet night is to be carried in a sedan chair; a 
sedan chair of the eighteenth century is kept in the hall for 
the purpose, and passes from one Master of the Temple to 
another. 

Charles Kingsley's daughter, Mrs. St. Leger Harrison — 
the " Lucas Malet " of fame — used to come to us sometimes 
before she went back to live at Eversley, immortalised by her 
father ; and once her cousin, the famous African explorer, the 
other Mary Kingsley, came, Lucas Malet is all that one 
might expect of Charles Kingsley's daughter and the writer 
of Sir Richard Calmady. 

It seems natural to mention the author of Concerning 
Isabel Carnaby beside the author of Sir Richard Calmady. 
The two books made a stir about the same time, and the 
public mixed their titles with great impartiality. The 
author of the former, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, now the 
Hon. Mrs. Felkin, with her sister, Edith Fowler, was a good 
many times at Addison Mansions. I have told the story of 
her becoming an authoress in my chapter on the Idlers and 
Vagabonds. 

I should have mentioned Beatrice Harraden before. When 
you see this small, slight, delicate-looking woman, with her 
bright eyes, you are forcibly reminded of the invalid heroine 



130 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

of Ships that Pass in the Night. But Beatrice Harraden is a 
public school woman; she was at Cheltenham College — the 
ladies' College — and has taken the liveliest interest in all 
the interests of women since. She was cured, I fancy, of 
some pulmonary disease by going to California. She now 
has one of the most unique flats in Hampstead. I do not 
remember how I met her, but it was a long time ago, and I 
was very elated, because I always thought Ships that Pass 
in the Night one of the best- written short novels in the 
language. 

Helen Mathers has for many years been a dear friend of 
ours. She was another of the authors whose acquaintance 
it elated me to make. Although she is much about the 
same age as myself, she made her two successes with Comin^ 
Through the Rye and Cherry Ripe when I was a boy at school. 
Her husband, Henry Reeves, the eminent orthopaedist, was 
one of the very first doctors to make practical use of the 
X-rays. She had a son in the army who promised to be 
her worthy successor in literature had he lived, as the writing 
which he achieved proved. Her real name was Mathews. 
She was a cousin of the Estella Mathews who married my 
near neighbour, George Cave, K.C., M.P., who was in my 
team, as was Mr. Justice Montague Shearman, when I was 
Captain of the Public Schools Football Club at Oxford, and 
who now occasionally plays golf with me when he can get 
a day off from the Courts, and from the case against Home 
Rule. 

Frances Hodgson Burnett I first met in Washington, where 
she was the wife of a well-known doctor, and the mother of 
two beautiful boys in velvet Patience suits, locally called 
Fauntleroy suits, in honour of her book Little Lord Fauntleroy. 
But she was not an American; she was an Englishwoman 
born in Manchester, who had made her fame with a book 
about the north of England, called That Lass o' Lowrie's. 
Eventually she came back to live in her native England, first 
of all in a house in Portland Place and afterwards in a manor 
house in Kent. Her gigantic success with books and plays 
did not turn her head; she was always the same gracious 
human woman she had been when she was making her way. 



LADY AUTHORS 131 

John Oliver Hobbes, on the other hand, though she Hved 
so much in England, and wrote all her books over here, was 
an American-born, the daughter of John Morgan Richards, 
who was at one time Chairman of the American Society in 
London, and had as much to do with entente cordiale between 
England and the United States as any American Ambassador 
at the Court of St. James'. He was, as it were, a sort of 
social ambassador. The great house in Lancaster Gate in 
which he lived till he retired from business was a focus of 
entertainment for both branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. 

Mrs. Craigie was a friend of our present Queen. She was 
extraordinarily clever and extraordinarily charming. She 
always gave every one to whom she was talking the know- 
ledge that for the time being nobody else existed for her. 
In intellect she was the equal of any contemporary woman 
writer; added to this, she was very pretty, very engaging, 
very well dressed, and certainly proved the truth of the 
proverb " Whom the gods love, die young." She had the 
gift of bringing out the wit as well as the best qualities of 
others. 

Another American authoress who has spent most of her 
life and done all her writing in England is Irene Osgood, 
who came here as a very beautiful young bride of fabulous 
wealth, and rented a house which was one of the shrines of 
English literature — Knebworth, the home of Bulwer Lytton. 
She did not write Servitude, the book by which she will be 
remembered, there, but at Guilsborough, in Northampton- 
shire, another seat which she took for the hunting. 

Yet another American authoress, who was also young and 
beautiful when she came to England, was Amelie Rives, who 
was at that time wife of J. A. Chanler, a great-grandson of 
the original Astor, but is now Princess Troubetzkoi. The 
daughter of a Virginian country gentleman, she simply leapt 
into fame with a book called Virginia of Virginia, which 
took the Americans by storm. She was irresistibly clever, 
and very striking-looking, with her pale gold hair, clear 
dusky complexion, and big blue eyes. 

Gertrude Franklin Atherton, a remarkable-looking Cali- 
fornian with the same pale gold hair and rather the same 



132 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

complexion as Amelie Rives, whose mother was a great- 
grandniece of Benjamin FrankHn, was at one time a very- 
frequent visitor of ours. She was a long time getting her 
recognition, and then suddenly leapt into her full fame. 
But those who used to meet her socially knew from the first 
that she was a woman of commanding intellect. She had 
an odd trick of wearing a quill thrust through her hair. 

Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson are among my oldest 
literary friends. I made Williamson's acquaintance when 
he was sub-editor of the Graphic, and asked me to write an 
illustrated article on Adam Lindsay Gordon. Alice Living- 
ston was an American girl, who came over to England to 
spend a year with some friends, and has never been back in 
her own country for more than three months at a time since. 
She had a letter of introduction to C. N. Williamson, who 
introduced her to a number of London editors, and thus 
gave her a chance of success in story-writing. After their 
marriage she wrote many serial stories, some of which ap- 
peared in book form ; but the first great " Williamson 
success " was The Lightning Conductor, suggested by their 
earliest motoring adventures in France and Italy. C. N. 
Williamson having expert knowledge as a mechanical 
engineer (he intended to be one, before he determined to 
become a writer), it was easy to mingle amusing mechanical 
details of motoring with the story, a feature which appealed 
to lovers of automobiles in the days, ten or eleven years ago, 
when the sport was an uncertain adventure. 

They both love story-telling — Mrs. Williamson used to 
" print " stories when she was six years old, before she could 
write — and have written a good many popular travel novels 
since The Lightning Conductor. They love also to see the 
far corners of the world, though they contrive to spend two 
or three months each winter in their Riviera house, and a 
month or two in summer among their friends in London. 

Next to travelling, they love to build houses, and make 
them beautiful. If they see some land on a hillside with a 
splendid view, they can hardly resist buying it, and planning 
exactly the sort of house which ought to exist there. This 
means that they sell their last house, and begin another, 



LADY AUTHORS 133 

with a different sort of garden, but there must always be a 
bull-dog in it, rejoicing in the name of Tiberius, or " Tibe." 

Madame Albanesi, one of the most successful novelists of 
the day, and wife of the well-known musician, is an old 
friend of ours. She had long been one of the most successful 
writers of serial fiction in popular journals, but it was not 
until after her marriage with Signor Albanesi that she turned 
her attention to novels — one of the earliest of these books 
receiving remarkable reviews. She conceived the idea of 
advertising these reviews herself, with the result that she was 
approached by a number of leading publishers for her next 
book, and happily followed with the book which established 
her name — Susannah and One Other, a book which has been 
running for over ten years, and is still selling. The book- 
reading public only required to have its attention adequately 
drawn to her novels, to see what admirable stories they 
were — faithful to life, pulsing with human nature. 

I asked Madame Albanesi what first made her write. She 
said that she could not remember when she had not tried to 
write in some form or other, and that happily for her, when 
she was quite a girl circumstances threw her into a circle 
where her gift of imaginative writing was warmly encouraged, 
and opportunities were found for turning this gift to the most 
satisfactory results. I remember Madame Albanesi telling 
me that an interesting fact in connection with her earlier 
writing was that her imagination was so fertile that she 
used — before she was twenty years old — to keep three or 
four serials running at the same time. She never had less 
than two going at once, and wrote them in instalments from 
week to week, and never took a note. Everything was 
published anonymously, and a new serial would begin before 
the old one was finished. Madame Albanesi regards her 
serial work as being the very best training for telling a good 
story. 

I ought to have mentioned earlier, since she belonged to 
that generation, John Strange Winter, a shining light in 
Bohemia at the epoch of which I am writing. She made 
her first success when I was at Oxford, with Booties' Baby, 
and Hoop-la, but she had lost her vogue before we went to 



134 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

live at Addison Mansions, though her name remained a house- 
hold word, and she continued to publish a number of popular 
books. She was then living in an old house at Merton near 
Wimbledon, but shortly afterwards came to live at West 
Kensington, because she found Merton too far out. 

She was a woman of inexhaustible energy, and had a 
very kind heart. She was exceedingly good to young 
authors and journalists; she made their cause her own; 
she welcomed them to her house, and visited theirs. She 
was a sister-in-law of George Augustus Sala. She was un- 
fortunate in losing her public ; she would have it again if she 
were alive now. But at that time a wave of preciousness and 
morbidness, which left her stranded, was passing over the 
country. 

" George Egerton " and " Roy Devereux," very pretty and 
clever women, were at the top of that wave among women, 
the former with books like Keynotes, the latter, and George 
Egerton's beautiful sister, Miss Dunne, with brilliant and 
virile journalism in the Saturday Review, the Pall Mall and 
elsewhere. Lane was their publisher, Beardsley was their 
illustrator, H. G. Wells headed the list of their male rivals, 
followed by Arthur Machen, H. D. Lowry and others. I 
have all their books — such slim books for novels. Fisher 
Unwin had another school of them, headed by John Oliver 
Hobbes, as daring from the sex point of view, but lighter in 
touch, which he published in long slim books with yellow 
paper covers at eighteenpence each. Some Emotions and 
a Moral came out in this series, which I heard some one ask 
for at Smith's Library quite seriously as Some Morals and a 
Reputation. These were Wells's Time Machine, Stolen Bacillus, 
and Wonderful Visit days. 

I asked George Egerton, who was in camp at Tauranga 
during the Maori war as an infant, and as a child was in 
her uncle Admiral Bynon's fleet while he was bombarding 
Valparaiso, and who I knew was intended for an artist, what 
had made her turn writer. She told me — 

" Why I wrote? Because I had to. Why I wrote as I 
did ? Because I felt woman could only hope to do one thing 
in literature — put herself into it. Write not in breeches, but 



LADY AUTHORS 135 

in corsets. That I took the name of George Egerton was 
partly because I did not think any pubhsher would take 
stories of that kind written by a woman, partly to see if my 
sex would make itself felt. Keynotes went into seven lan- 
guages in two years. I am not dead abroad. At the Goethe 
Centenary in Weimar the Dr. Professor who gave the lecture 
on literature of the century, spoke of Rudyard Kipling and 
George Egerton as the two who had introduced a new note, 
a new method, into English literature ' in our time.' 

" I gave up writing books when I found that authors are 
' unsecured creditors ' — not worth the candle unless one can 
reel off popular stuff. I can't. I go to America with plays. 
I make any money I make there. I shall arrive here to. 
I am doing a big book now, and I am starting a book of 
recollections. If one attaches credence to the fortune- 
tellers, I am to live to be an old woman. It might be amusing, 
if only to demolish the men and women of straw one has seen 
lauded to the skies, in one's memory." 

Marie Belloc, who had not then married Lowndes of The 
Times, was a constant visitor. She belonged very much to 
the Idler and Vagabond set of which we saw so much, and 
was already longing to write novels, though many years were 
to go by before she was able to fulfil her wish. She is a sister 
of Hilaire Belloc, the free-lance M.P. of the last Parliament, 
one of the wittiest writers of the day, who has the further 
distinction of having been a driver in a French artillery 
regiment and a Scholar of Balliol afterwards. It should 
be added that he was twenty-three when he went up to 
Oxford. 

Marie Stuart Boyd, of the same set, the wife of the well- 
known Punch and Graphic artist, did not begin to publish 
her delightful books till nearly ten years later, though she 
was a regular contributor to important Reviews. 

Mrs. Frankau (" Frank Danby "), who came with her 
sister, Mrs. Aria, had at that time dropped writing for en- 
graving, and did not resume it till some years later. Pigs in 
Clover, and her other successes in fiction, belong to a much 
later date. 

One of the most daring and witty of women writers, Violet 



136 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Hunt, was constantly at our at-homes. With a father who 
was a well-known artist, a Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, 
and a friend of Gladstone's, and a mother who wrote novels 
of repute ; and brought up in the brilliant set which gathered 
round Burne- Jones and Ford Madox Brown, it was no wonder 
that she should be extraordinarily clever, and no one was 
surprised when she produced scintillating books like The 
Maiden's Progress and A Hard Woman. South Lodge, their 
house on Campden Hill, was a Mecca for distinguished 
literary people. It was there that I first met Andrew Lang, 
Robert Hichens, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Cecil 
Thurston in a crowd of writers of high calibre. It was one 
of the few houses where Lang was natural without being 
rude. 

I now come to a group of able women writers whom I 
met at clubs like the Pioneers and the Writers', though they 
mostly came often to our at-homes afterwards. First 
among them I may place that brilliant and delightful writer, 
Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick, who published her early novels under 
the pseudonym of " Mrs. Andrew Dean." Her husband, 
Mr. Alfred Sidgwick, is the author of well-known works on 
logic, and one of the earliest of the modern school of philo- 
sophers, known as the Pragmatists. He is a cousin of Mr. 
Henry Sidgwick (d. 1900), the distinguished Professor of 
Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, who married Mr. A. J. 
Balfour's sister, the guardian spirit of Newnham. 

Mrs. Sidgwick's novels have always been full of verve. 
She has steeped herself in the literature of three countries, 
and until she married knew the world better from the 
Continental point of view than from the English, But her 
marriage took her amongst English people, so that she has 
had unusual opportunities of understanding two nationalities 
intimately. In those days we saw a good deal of her because 
she lived at Surbiton, but for many years past she has lived 
in Cornwall. 

At the same club I met Miss Montr esor, whose delicate 
health has prevented her seeing much of London literary 
society, though she lives in South Kensington. With her 
Into the Highways and Hedges she leapt into fame at a single 



LADY AUTHORS 137 

bound. Miss Montresor is a genius. Her intuition enables 
her to describe with fidelity phases of life with which she 
cannot have had any acquaintance. When she wrote Into 
the Highways and Hedges, my friend Sheldon, who was the 
London manager of D. Appleton & Co., gave me five 
pounds to write a careful opinion of it, to see whether his 
firm, to whom it had been offered, should publish it or not. 
I gave them a long opinion, in which I told them that they 
could not possibly refuse such a book. But they did refuse 
it, because almost any American publisher will refuse any 
novel which is not by a novelist who has already made a 
great name. Some other New York firm took it, and it 
was the book of the year in America. 

At a club, too, I met Annie Swan (whose husband. Dr. 
Burnett Smith, was last year Mayor of Hertford), twenty 
years and more ago, a woman completely unspoiled by 
success, which came to her early and without stint, and 
remained. She stands at the very head of the writers of the 
wholesome school of fiction. In those days she lived at 
Hampstead, in a house called " Aldersyde," after the novel 
which gave her her fame. She is one of those people whose 
obvious sincerity charms you the moment you meet them. 
I don't know whether she is interested in spiritualism, but 
I did on one occasion meet Florence Marryat and Dora 
Russell together at her table. 

Of Florence Marryat (Mrs. Francis Lean), the daughter of 
the immortal Captain Marryat, I saw a good deal at one 
time. She was a very regular attendant at a dining club 
called the Argonauts, which Frankfort Moore and I got up 
because the Vagabonds would not then admit ladies to their 
banquets. Spiritualism played an immense part in her life. 
She was also a very voluminous writer. I remember her 
telling me that she had written more than seventy novels. 
She was a tall, striking-looking woman, whose eyes suggested 
intimacy with the occult. 

The Leightons, who are among my most valued friends, I 
certainly met at some club — Marie Leighton is the best 
newspaper serial writer of the day — a story-teller born, and, 
like her husband, a great authority on dogs. One at any 



138 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

rate of her thrilling stories has been dramatised and others 
are sure to follow, as the managers of the melodrama theatres 
recognise how immensely dramatic her stories are. 

" Lucas Cleeve," another frequent visitor at our house, 
wife of Colonel Kingscote, and daughter of Sir Henry 
Drummond Wolff, M.P., who made with Mr. Balfour, Lord 
Randolph Churchill, and Sir John Gorst the celebrated 
Fourth Party, had an extraordinary facility for writing 
novels of a certain merit, and, like her father, was a great 
linguist and traveller. Sir John Gorst introduced me to 
her. I met him at Castle Combe, which now belongs to him, 
and then belonged to his brother, the late Edward Chadwick 
Lowndes. I was staying with my brother-in-law, Robert 
Watkins, the agent of the estate, which is one of historical 
interest, for its archives prove it to have been irretrievably 
wasted by Sir John Fastolfe, Knt., Shakespeare's Falstaff, 
who had married the widow of the last of its Scroop owners, 
and managed the estate for her. He built the chancel 
arches in the church, fine and early Perpendicular. The 
Scroop and Falstaff house has long since disappeared, while 
the Cromlech of a British Chief, and a Roman Camp, continue 
almost perfect. I was often the guest of Sir John's eldest 
son, Sir Eldon, when I was in Egypt, and his younger son, 
Harold, and his charming wife, have been our intimate 
friends for many years. Mrs. Harold Gorst, who was a Miss 
Kennedy of the famous Shrewsbury School family of scholars, 
has an extraordinary knowledge of the life of the poor in 
London, and her novels reflect it with a fidelity which should 
have won them ten times their circulation. 

Quite a prominent place among the authoresses who used 
to assemble on those evenings at Addison Mansions is occu- 
pied by novelists who began as my secretaries, and whom I 
trained to write. 

I have been singularly fortunate in my choice of them. 
Not only have they given me so much satisfaction as secre- 
taries that I have only had to send one away for inefficiency, 
and none for any other reason, but they have made such 
good use of the opportunities they had for observing the 
ways of book-writing, that in the twenty-seven years since 



i 



LADY AUTHORS 139 

the first came to me, they have between them had more 
than twenty-seven books published and paid for by leading 
firms like Hutchinson, Heinemann, Methuen, Hurst & 
Blackett, Constable & Co., Chatto & Windus, Eveleigh 
Nash, Mills & Boon and Stanley Paul. 

My first secretary was Norma Lorimer, who came to us 
in her teens, before our memorable journey to America, 
Canada and the Far East. She has accompanied us on 
every important journey we ever made in Europe, Asia, 
Africa and America since I returned from Australia. When 
typewriting came in, she ceased to be my secretary, because 
she was never a typist, but she continued to live with us, 
and act as hostess, since my wife's health has never per- 
mitted her to undertake the strain of managing the large 
literary, artistic and theatrical receptions which we held 
weekly for a good many years. 

During that period Miss Lorimer made an immense circle 
of friends, which included practically every one in our 
acquaintance. Men like Fisher of the Literary World, and 
Robert Barr urged her to write a book for years before she 
could persuade herself to put pen to paper, though seeing 
so many of my books put together, and transcribing when 
they were finished, had familiarised her with the process 
of book-making, and though she had assisted me at every 
stage, in sight-seeing with an armful of guide-books, in 
making copious notes, in studying all the available authorities 
on the subject, and in digesting and arranging the information 
if it was a travel-book, or in giving her advice about the 
story if it was a novel. She must have been with us quite 
ten years before she published her first book, A Sweet Disorder. 
Since then, besides the two books in which she collaborated 
with me. Queer Things about Sicily and More Queer Things 
about Japan, she has brought out Josiah's Wife, Mirry-Ann, 
By the Waters of Sicily, Catherine Sterling, On Etna, By the 
Waters of Carthage, The Pagan Woman, By the Waters of 
Egypt, By the Waters of Italy, The Second Woman, A Wife out 
of Egypt, and By the Waters of Germany. 

It gives me great satisfaction to think that she was my 
pupil in writing, for most of these books will stand reading 



140 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

again and again for the admirable sayings and analyses of 
life with which they are strewn, as well as for their stories, 
and the knowledge displayed in them. They are redolent 
with the atmosphere of the Isle of Man, Japan, Italy, Sicily, 
Tunis and Egypt, and one of them, JosiaWs Wife, contains 
a brilliant picture of America, where she lived with us for 
nearly three years. 

Miss Lorimer comes of a very clever family. Her uncle, 
James Lorimer, was Professor of International Law in the 
Edinburgh University, and wrote some of the standard 
books upon the subject. He was a man of international 
reputation. His hobby was the restoration of Kellie Castle 
in Fifeshire, which he acquired from Lord Kellie and Mar, 
and, as the Latin inscription sets forth, " rescued it from the 
bats and the owls." Living at Kellie was the inspiration of 
three of his clever children. His youngest son, now Sir 
Robert Lorimer, has become the most famous living Scottish 
architect. He had the high honour of building the Chapel 
of the Knights of the Thistle in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edin- 
burgh. His second son, J. H. Lorimer, the Scottish 
Academician, is recognised as one of the soundest painters 
of the day. One daughter. Lady im Thurn, caught the trick 
of the beautiful moulded plaster ceilings at Kellie, done by 
a wandering band of Italian artists in the seventeenth 
century, and was entrusted with the execution of the moulded 
plaster ceilings which Lord Bute had made for his House of 
Falkland. Another daughter is an author, and the other 
married Sir David Chalmers, the only man who ever earned 
two pensions as Chief Justice of two tropical colonies. 

My next secretary was Miss Maude (Mary) Chester Craven, 
who had quarrelled with her stepfather, and was seeking to 
make her own way in the world. 

She was a singularly clever girl, very much interested in 
literature, with a great sense of humour, and a great idea 
of " copy." Had she come to me later, when I was writing 
the various volumes of Queer Things series, I should have 
been able to make better use of her help. She was most 
generous and self-sacrificing, and when she had thrown 
herself into the subject, you could hardly get her away 



LADY AUTHORS 141 

from the papers. And she was very well read on certain 
subjects. 

A few years after she left me she wrote an excellent book 
called Famous Beauties of Two Reigns. Since then she has 
found a niche all to herself in book-producing — teaching 
people who have led interesting lives, and have good stories 
to tell, but have had no literary experience, how to put their 
biographies together and editing them herself. The books 
produced in this way have proved some of the greatest 
sensations of our times. Lady Cardigan led off, followed 
by the adventurous ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, and Lord 
Rossmore's racy recollections came as an entr'acte to the 
drama of Meyerling as narrated by Countess Larisch. 

Editing these books has made Miss Craven — she is now 
Mrs, Charles ffoulkes, wife of the Master of the Armour of 
the Tower of London — an admirable raconteur, and she told 
me that the late M. Charles Sauerwein, directeur of Le Matin, 
had offered her a large sum to write her reminiscences of 
her " sitters," but conscientious scruples prevented her from 
accepting the tempting offer, as to disclose all she knew 
would have caused trouble in London and elsewhere. 

The ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, for instance, was a 
most ingenuous person, who would have written a chapter, 
had Miss Craven permitted her, on "why the royal honeymoon 
bored her to tears," and much more that would have caused 
endless scandal and heartburnings to the Saxon court. 

" Our Louise," as she was termed by her subjects, had a 
positive mania for cleanliness, and she told Miss Craven that 
once when she was travelling with her mother the water 
supply gave out and she was in despair how to wash her 
hands. But necessity originated a brilliant idea, and at 
the next stop Louise rushed to the buffet, and returned with 
a waiter staggering under many bottles of mineral water, 
with which she performed her ablutions. " Surely," re- 
marked the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, " there is no 
accounting for your vagaries, Louise ! " 

Miss Craven asked the Princess what she most desired to 
do when the dullness of palace life obsessed her. " To post 
a letter in a pillar-box like any one else," was the reply. 



142 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Once, coming from the Continent, she overheard some fellow- 
passengers discussing her rather freely, and entering into the 
spirit of the adventure, Louise joined in the conversation, 
and for once saw herself as others saw her. " Well," said 
she, as the train slowed into Charing Cross, " you've had an 
opportunity of meeting that terrible woman — I am the 
ex-Crown Princess," and when the horror-stricken occupants 
of the compartment saw her name upon her small luggage, 
they realised that the pretty, vivacious, fair woman was none 
other than the former wife of the King of Saxony. 

Lady Cardigan (whose recollections " Labby " described 
as a classic) disliked the blue pencil, for she saw no reason 
why you should not say what you like in a book. She was 
a most brilliant anecdotist, and Miss Craven said she could 
tell good stories for a fortnight without repeating herself. 
One, which related to a well-known Bacchanalian member 
of the aristocracy, is worth recalling. The gentleman in 
question once kissed a pretty housemaid, who made a decidedly 
original protest. " I wonder, my Lord," said the girl, " that 
a nobleman like you don't drink champagne. Brandy do 
colour your breath." 

Lady Cardigan held the opinion that sauce for the goose 
was sauce for the gander. " Men fall in love with ballet- 
girls, barmaids and servants," she once remarked, " so why 
shouldn't women fall in love with men of inferior station if 
it amuses them ? " 

Maude Craven could tell of flutterings in the dove-cotes of 
Mayfair, and of many skeletons in ancestral cupboards whose 
bones must have rattled in dread of what Lady Cardigan's 
marvellous memory could have recalled about them. 

The lady who followed Miss Craven had only been with us 
for a short time when the doctors told her that she could 
not live in England. She went to California and got married. 
Miss Marie Ivory, who followed her, married a famous artist. 

Miss Ethel Phipps, the next, was with us for several years, 
and accompanied us to Italy and Sicily, and inaugurated the 
system of tissue-paper scrap-books, which I have found so 
useful in collecting the materials for my books of travel. 
And she was an excellent typist, the first excellent typist 



LADY AUTHORS 148 

we had had, though I took up the use of the typewriter quite 
early. The first I ever had was a Remington which I bought 
in 1883 in Sydney from a man named Cunningham who 
reported law cases for the Sydney Morning Herald. He 
sold it to me for half the price he had given for it (I paid 
him about fifteen pounds, I think), because the judges would 
not look at his notes when they were in typewriting. He 
had bought the instrument under the idea that the extra 
legibility would be received with acclaim. The judges 
thought that the machine might not write down what the 
reporter meant it to — they credited it with the powers of a 
planchette, which was then very fashionable. 

Miss Phipps wrote a very amusing little book called 
Belinda and Others, which Warne bought from her and 
published both in England and America. 

When she left us because she was needed at home, her 
place was taken by a very clever and interesting girl fresh 
from school, who has made a great name for herself in fiction 
— Miss Ethel May Stevens, whose pen-name is Ethel Stefana 
Stevens. We took her to Sicily almost directly she came to 
us, and Italianised her surname into the nickname Stefana, 
by which even her own relations grew to call her. 

The moment I saw her I was struck by her brilliance and 
intelligence, and I did not require to learn that she had 
carried everything before her at Miss Douglas's famous 
school in Queen's Gate, to know that she was much the 
ablest of the ladies who answered my advertisement when 
Miss Phipps had to leave us. 

At various times she travelled all over Italy and Sicily 
with us, and visited Tunis and Carthage. She was with us 
for several years, and a great worker. On her fell the almost 
incredible labour of typing out and keeping sorted the 
immense mass of materials accumulated chiefly from Italian 
sources, for the Encyclopaedia called Things Sicilian, which 
forms the bulk of my Sicily, the New Winter Resort. 

She had studied a great deal before she came to us, and 
besides a good knowledge of French and German and music 
(she played the violin charmingly), had a strange accomplish- 
ment — she spoke Romany, the Gipsy language, so fluently 



144 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

that when she made up a Httle, even gipsies took her for a 
gipsy. She had learnt it in the New Forest, which was near 
her home. She began before she had been very long with 
us the gipsy novel, which now, after many years, she has 
taken up again. It was a story with a strong love interest 
in it, but it gave no promise of the admirable gift of writing 
which she has shown in her published works like The Veil 
and The Mountain of God. In the large amount of review- 
ing which she did for me — against time, it was true — she 
had a habit of introducing stock phrases and introductory 
periphrases, such as " the worst of the whole matter was 
that," " that redoubtable," " the venerable form of." 
Her criticisms of books were in judgment very good, but 
in expression they were verbose and lacking in distinc- 
tion. She was always studying in the fine library which 
I had collected as a reviewer. Besides gipsy-lore and 
music she was especially interested in everything con- 
nected with occultism and amulets, and the Black Art 
generally, and everything connected with the Orient. It 
was in the three excellent chapters which she wrote for my 
Carthage and Tunis, where they are signed with her own 
initials, E. M. S., instead of the E. S. S. she uses now, that 
Miss Stevens first showed what she could do when she tried. 
The chapters are Chapter VI, Volume I, " The Lavigerie 
Museum at Cairo" ; Chapter XVIII, Volume II, " Super- 
stition in Tunis " ; Chapter XX, Volume II, "A Tunisian 
Harem, and the Tombs of the Beys." 

It was when she was visiting Tunis with us that she first 
heard the " East a-callin'." She found it absolutely irre- 
sistible. In the short time that we were there she began to 
learn Arabic, and acquired quite a good knowledge of Arab 
amulets, and the Egyptian amulets in the museum at Carth- 
age. She afterwards paid another visit to Tunis before she 
wrote her memorable book. The Veil, one of the most successful 
novels of its year. 

In search of a fresh Oriental subject, she next went to 
Haifa, the Syrian seaport, where she was lucky enough to 
live in the little colony which surrounded the present head 
of the Bahai movement, and to see a great deal of the inner 



LADY AUTHORS 145 

working of that movement, which is said to count half the 
Shia Mohammedans (chiefly Persians) among its secret 
adherents. So high an opinion did Abbas Effendi form of 
her abilities, that he invited her to stay in his house and 
gave her a special course of instruction, which lasted over 
many months, in the philosophy of the sect. 

Her stay at Haifa also supplied her with the materials for 
her second novel. The Mountain of God. Since then she has 
published several able and successful books, just as The 
Earthen Drum, The Long Engagement, The Lure and Sarah 
Eden, for the material of which she paid two visits to 
Jerusalem. 

My next secretary, who was with me for seven years, has 
also had three books published by leading firms. 

It is not by any means an uncommon thing for authors' 
secretaries to become authors. One of the most conspicuous 
examples is Mary E. Wilkins, now Mrs. Freeman-Wilkins, 
who was for a long time secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
I well remember the day when he stopped me in the street in 
Boston (U.S.A.), to say, " I have a hated rival. My secre- 
tary, Mary Wilkins, has just published a novel — a much better 
one than I ever wrote." 



CHAPTER XII 

LITERARY CLUBS : MY CONNECTION WITH THE AUTHORS' 
CLUB 

When we came back from the United States in 1891, 
besides our wide American circle, most of whom were in the 
habit of frequently visiting England in the season, we soon 
found ourselves in the heart of a Bohemian society, which 
met almost daily at one or other club or reception. Recep- 
tions had become the order of the day among London literary 
people, artists and actors. The epidemic came over from 
America at the same time as the habit of personal 
journalising. Certain popular newspapers devoted columns 
and columns every week to giving every species of good- 
natured gossip about the biographies and home-lives of well- 
known people. It was this movement which culminated 
in the production of Who's Who. Interviewing was a feature 
of the day. From living like hermit-crabs, English authors 
suddenly began to realise the value of publicity in the sale 
of their wares. 

They had always in a decorous Victorian way met at the 
Athenaeum Club, but that did not open its doors at all. The 
pleasant Garrick and the Savile had an almost equal dread 
of literary burglars. The National Club had only a select 
few authors who liked its fleshpots. But their younger 
rivals saw in receptions a fresh element of interest to attract 
and benefit members. The Arts Club, the newly founded 
Authors' Club, the Hogarth, the Savage, the Vagabonds, 
and the Playgoers, to all of which I had been elected, were 
free and fearless in their hospitalities, and here, and through 
friends I met in these clubs, I acquired the friendship of many 
of the world's workers. 

The Arts Club in those days was a jolly place ; charming 
and distinguished men could be found dining there almost 

146 



THE AUTHORS' CLUB 147 

every night, and after dinner you played pool with the Royal 
Academicians, or talked scandal about the way that artists 
were elected, and pictures selected, to the Royal Academy. 
These were most enjoyable evenings. 

At the Hogarth, not far off, the artists who were not in 
the Academy or in the Academy set, used to assemble. It 
is the artist's habit to work till daylight is gone, and then to 
waste his time in conversation or the billiard-room. The 
talk, when it was not shop, was all what they call in theatrical 
circles " gag." Some of their shop was quite interesting, 
because it ran upon new men and new methods. I liked 
the latter best. Artists, unlike authors, are generally more 
ready to detract than to praise. They wish to mount over 
the bodies of the slain ; they do not hold out a hand to those 
who are lower down the hill. But they were very kind to each 
other with money, though they were so unkind to each other's 
work, and none of them seemed to stay at home to read after 
they had done their work. 

The Authors' Club had been established recently enough 
for me to come in as an original member. The Vagabonds 
Club, which had been in existence for a good many years, 
had not yet expanded into the New Vagabonds Club, nor 
had the White Friars organised banquets. The old Play- 
goers had a good many literary members, chiefly dramatists 
or would-be's. The Arts, the happy hunting-ground of 
famous artists, had a few ; the Hogarth, the favourite meet- 
ing-place for less favourite artists, had a few more ; the Savage, 
in spite of its traditions, and the Garrick not many more; 
and the editors of the Idler were in the habit of giving teas, 
which practically constituted a tea club without a sub- 
scription. I never was at the Yorick. 

The Authors' Club at that time took the lead in receptions. 
Sir Walter Besant, who founded it, made it his mission in 
life to bring authors together, both for the enjoyment of 
each other's company, and for the defence of their common 
interests. For these purposes he originated both the Authors' 
Club and the Authors' Society, which had, in 1891, the same 
secretary, and himself for chairman of both, but which were 
technically unconnected. 



148 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

The Authors' Club owed its success, and especially the 
success of its meetings, to Oswald Crawfurd, not less than to 
Besant himself. Crawfurd had written a book or two, but 
he had no eminence in literature, beyond having put enough 
money into Chapman & Hall to become chairman of the 
company and editor of its review, the Fortnightly. But 
Crawfurd was rich, and at Eton, and as a Consul-General, 
he had won the friendship of half the well-known people in 
London. He used his influence, his energy and his money, 
prodigally, in making the new Club go. He entertained 
possible members both at the Club, and in his own home and 
at favourite restaurants; he wrote an enormous number 
of persuasive letters; he kept the thing going generally. 
The Club was his protege as much as Besant's. 

Besant, with whom I had been in correspondence before I 
went to America, at the moment that he recruited me for the 
Club, was interested in introducing American methods at its 
meetings, and as I had just returned from America, the 
directors made me honorary secretary for this purpose. 

I spent three years in America, and during that time enjoyed 
the hospitality of all the leading literary and Bohemian 
Clubs in New York, Boston and Washington. Washington, 
as far as I remember, had only one of any importance, but 
Boston and New York were rich in them, and I brought 
over ideas from them. 

I explained to Besant what seemed to me the best features 
of American literary gatherings, and he evolved from them a 
programme for our weekly dinners at the Authors' Club ; but 
he thought that reading a paper, followed by a discussion, or 
entertaining a great author, whose health was proposed and 
who had to make a reply, was more suited to an English 
audience than telling anecdotes. I think he was right; 
telling anecdotes is not an English art. The American 
expects boundless patience from his audience while he elabor- 
ates the gist of the story ; the longer he prolongs the agony, 
the better his audience likes it. He has made a fine art 
of story-telling, and does it well enough to take the place of a 
curtain-raiser at a theatre. The Englishman only does it 
in private — generally to the distress of his family — or intro- 



THE AUTHORS' CLUB 149 

duces it incidentally into one of his speeches. Except 
barristers, and politicians, and clergymen, most Englishmen 
are afraid of the sound of their own voices in public, though 
Englishwomen often do not suffer from this disability. There 
is really some justification for the story of the man who was 
asked to give a definition of woman. He began, " Woman 
is, generally speaking ..." " Stop there ! " said his 
friend. " If you went on for a thousand years you would 
never get so near it again." 

Englishwomen as a class are much better speakers than 
Englishmen. 

We got along comfortably at the Authors' Club with enter- 
taining eminent persons, and expecting them to speak in 
recognition of the compliment, until Sir Augustus Harris 
was asked to propose the health of Isidore di Lara, whose 
opera he had just presented at Drury Lane. Harris made a 
long speech, in which he told us all that he had done for grand 
opera, how much money he had spent, what singers, male and 
female he had discovered and the rest of it, and was very 
pleased with himself, and after about half-an-hour sat down 
without making the slightest allusion to di Lara. Oswald 
Crawfurd, I think it was, who noticed the omission, and, 
springing to his feet, proposed the toast. 

After this it was felt that we ought to do something to 
strengthen the programme, and Besant proposed a form of 
entertainment which had come up in the United States since 
I had lived there. A man with the eminent name of Luther 
had hit upon an idea for giving authors a fourth profit on 
their works, and making them all contributors to his own profit. 
He called it " Uncut Leaves." Under this name he offered 
all the most eminent authors in America a generous price 
if they would read their productions in a lecture hall before 
they were published serially, so that they received money 
for recitation as well as for serial rights, book rights and 
dramatic rights. I believe it went very well in America for 
a while, but in London it was impossible to persuade a Meredith 
or a Hardy to listen to such a proposal. To start with, only 
a funny man had a chance of getting an English audience 
to listen to him reading his own productions. 



150 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Later on we did try the anecdotes with some success at 
informal dinners. 

In any case the Authors' Club dinners and entertainments 
became a great success. It was the most popular literary 
institution of the day, both at its temporary first home in 
Park Place, and afterwards at its proper house in Whitehall 
Court. Some of the most eminent men were its guests. 
Among them, besides great authors, were great prelates, 
great generals, great admirals, great politicians, who enjoyed 
being entertained by the Authors' Club better than at public 
banquets, because they only had to speak to fifty or a hundred 
men instead of addressing huge assemblies, and the formal 
part of the proceedings lasted such a short time that they 
might chat afterwards in the smoking-room or the billiard- 
room with their hosts, who always had among them men 
whose books they had been admiring for years. While 
Besant lived he was a great inspiration, and when he died his 
place was taken by others who had sprung to the forefront 
of literature in the interval. 

The Authors' Club differed from the original Vagabonds 
Club because only the Speaker or Speakers of the evening 
spoke, and the dinner was a more luxurious one. Most 
of the literary Vagabonds went to the Authors' Club too, but 
at the Authors' you met a fair sprinkling of the older authors 
like Sir Walter Besant, and, occasionally, Thomas Hardy. 
The gatherings were much larger. The Club contained many 
more members, and the bringing of guests was much more 
usual. Besant and Oswald Crawfurd brought a great many, 
generally distinguished men. 

If the names of everyone present at some of those dinners 
were published now, people would be astonished to see what a 
high percentage of them have become household words. 

Among them were John Hay, the greatest man the United 
States ever sent us as an Ambassador; the old Lord Chan- 
cellor; the old Lord Chief Justice; Lord Avebury, who 
invented the " bank-holidays " known as " St. Lubbock's- 
days "; Lord Strathcona, the father of the Canadian Pacific 
Railway, and the synonym for patriotic munificence in these 
latter days; Lord Wolseley, then Commander-in-Chief; 



m. 



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X ii 




CHARLES GARVICE 

Drawn by Yoshio Markino 



THE AUTHORS' CLUB 151 

Sir Ian Hamilton, who won the important battles of Wagon 
Hill and the Diamond Hills in the South African war; Sir 
Edward Seymour, the great Admiral, who won as much 
reputation by daring to be a failure on his march from Tientsin 
to Peking as he did by all his successes; Admiral Sir 
William Kennedy, the wittiest speaker in the navy ; Admiral 
Sir Hedworth Lambton, now Sir Hedworth Meux; and 
Admiral Sir Percy Scott, who saved the situation in the 
South African war by converting his 4*7 ship guns into 
field guns to meet the Boers' " long Toms " ; Bishop Creighton, 
and Bishop Ingram, of London; Bishop Gore, then of Wor- 
cester ; Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer ; Sir Leslie Stephen, 
the father of The Dictionary of National Biography; Sir 
Alma Tadema; Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Macaulay's 
nephew, who wrote two of the greatest biographies in the 
language. The Life of Macaulay and The Life of Fox, and has 
sons who rival him ; Sir William Ramsey, F.R.S. ; two famous 
brothers, the late Rt. Hon. Alfred Lyttleton, the greatest 
of all the giants of sport on record except C. B. Fry (who made 
the same impression on Parliament as he had made on his 
Eton schoolfellows by his loftiness of character), and his 
brother Edward, almost equally great in cricket, the head 
master of Eton; with authors like Rudyard Kipling, Ian 
Maclaren, Doyle, Barrie, Anthony Hope, Augustine Birrell, 
and Henry Arthur Jones. There are others equally eminent, 
if I could only remember them. 

The greatest favourite we ever had among our guests at 
the Authors' Club was " Ballahooley " — Robert Jasper 
Martin of Cromartin, better known as Bob Martin — a magni- 
ficent-looking Irish squire of the Charles Lever type, who 
bubbled over with natural wit. 

Bob Martin was a brother of Violet Martin of Ross, and 
cousin of Edith CEnone Somerville the lady M.F.H., who 
collaborated in Some Reminiscences of an Irish R.M. and 
other famous books of Irish life and character, and though 
he did not write much, he had the same limitless fund of 
humour. 

The first time that ever I took him to the Authors' Club 
the late Lord Wolseley was the guest of the evening, and an 



152 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

admirable guest of the evening he was — illustrious, interesting, 
urbane, a brilliant talker. He and Martin were old friends, 
and after Lord Wolseley's health had been proposed and he 
had responded in a speech which told us all about his literary- 
work — like Moltke, he was an author by instinct — Martin 
got up to tell us some of his inimitable Irish stories. The 
first was one about Lord Wolseley himself. In the days 
when he was only a colonel, a sergeant-major came to him 
for a day's leave to help his wife in doing the Company's 
washing. 

" I've been speaking to your wife, Pat," said Colonel 
Wolseley, " and she begged me, whenever you came to me 
for leave on her washing-day, to refuse you because you get 
in her way so," 

The man saluted, and turned to leave the room, but when he 
got to the door he turned round and saluted again, and asked, 
" Have I your leave to say something, Colonel? " 

" Yes, Pat." 

" Well, what I wish to say, sir, is that one of us two must 
be handling the truth rather carelessly, because I haven't 
got a wife." 

True or untrue, Lord Wolseley did not deny the impeach- 
ment. 

That same night " Ballahooley " told us of his first experi- 
ence of the Castle at Dublin. He was asked to stay there 
the first time he ever came to town, and he was not used to 
town ways. When his jaunting-car pulled up at the door of 
the Castle, he told the footman to give the coachman a drink, 
which was the custom of the country at Cromartin. The 
footman stared at him. 

" Didn't you hear what I said ? " he asked. 

" Yes, sir, I heard," said the footman slowly, and dis- 
appeared to fetch the drink because Martin swore at him so. 
When he came back, he brought a liqueur-glass of Benedictine 
on an immense silver tray. The coachman took the glass 
and smelt it — doubtfully. 

" It's all right, Pat, it was made by the Holy Fathers." 

Thus encouraged, Pat drank it off. He made a wry 
face. 



THE AUTHORS' CLUB 153 

" Don't you like it, Pat? It's very good." 

" Oh, it's good enough," said the Jehu, " but what I'm 
thinking is that the man who blew that glass was mighty short 
of breath." 

That same evening he told us of the first election to a 
District Council which was ever held on his estates. The 
place was a hotbed of Nationalism, and Bob Martin was very 
anxious to have a friend of his, who was a Conservative, 
elected on to the Council. So he assembled all his tenants, 
and said to them, " I wish you'd elect this man. I've never 
asked you to do anything for me before, and I've made more 
money out of one rotten song (' Ballahooley ') than out of 
the whole blessed lot of you ever since I came in for this 
place." 

Their Irish minds were so struck by this piece of special 
pleading that they returned his candidate unopposed. 

Bishop Creighton was a very entertaining guest. Just 
because he was so great and so potent as an administrator, 
he could be perfectly natural when he was dining with a couple 
of score of authors. One could not imagine the present Bishop 
— whom I remember in the days when he was at Keble — he 
was a very plucky player at football, which he had learned 
at Marlborough — blurting out like his predecessor that the 
first thing he asked about a parson who was recommended 
for a living in his gift was " Is he a hustler? " Nor can one 
imagine him fencing with the late Father Stanton of St. 
Alban's, Holborn, over the use of incense. 

I wish I had not forgotten the name of that club to which 
he and Balfour and I forget what others of the greatest in 
the land, a dozen or twenty in all, mostly great politicians 
or prelates, belonged, who dined together at the Grand 
Hotel once or twice a month, and quietly enjoyed themselves 
like the Dilettanti. I suppose that it exists still. 

Bishop Gore was delightfully human the night that we 
entertained him at the Authors' Club. He said that he felt 
quite shy of replying to the toast of his health — that generally, 
when he was speaking, he was addressing an audience upon 
subjects on which he was entitled to speak with authority, 
and upon which his audience were very anxious to hear what 



154 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE | 

he had to say, but that on this occasion he was going to talk i 
about a subject which interested no one, meaning himself, 
and he was quite at a loss what to say. ; 

Sir Evelyn Wood, one of the few men who have ever won j 
the V.C. both as a sailor and a soldier — he was a midshipman I 
before he was a soldier, and made a famous ride with dispatches '< 
— and he has been called to the Bar since — supplemented | 
his speech in reply to the toast with a selection of rattling i 
anecdotes. J 

Sir Ian Hamilton, the General who saved Ladysmith by | 
his victory at Wagon Hill, described the touch and go of | 
his battle, which saved Ladysmith, in the slang of ordinary I 
conversation, which made it extraordinarily impressive. It 
was very appropriate, too, for slang was the language of the 
brief council of war which Sir Ian held with the Colonel of 
the Devons before they launched the charge which saved the 
day. 

One of the most interesting dinners we ever had was the 
dinner we gave to Zola in the Whitehall Rooms. We had 
other guests, varying from Stepniak, the Nihilist, to Frank 
Stockton and Bill Nye, the American humorists. Stockton 
told one of his characteristic American after-dinner stories 
of the " lady or the tiger " sort. Nye was really wonderful. 
He said that he himself belonged to an old French family— 
that the Nye family used always to spell their name Ney 
but they changed it because one of the family was unfortunate 
This allusion to the bravest of the brave brought the house 
down, but it took about a quarter of an hour to explain it 
to Zola. 

Henry Arthur Jones was extraordinarily interesting — 
Jones, if you catch him in the right mood, can make a really 
fine speech, full of imagination. 

One man whom I first met at the Authors' Club, and whom 
I afterwards got to know better, though I have not seen him 
for many years — Lucien Wolf, had an extremely original way 
of working. Besides his ordinary press work, once a month he 
contributed a presentation of the foreign politics of the world 
to one of the principal Reviews. As foreign editor of a daily 
paper, he had the subject at his fingers' ends, but it troubled 



:| 



THE AUTHORS* CLUB 155 

him in a subject so full of tangled threads to break off his 
work for meals and to go to bed. Writing that article took 
about forty-eight hours, and during that time he hardly left 
his study ; he did not go to bed at all ; like the Admiral who 
gave them their name, he had sandwiches brought to him 
where he sat. He apparently felt no ill-effects from this 
tremendous effort of will-power and industry, though, of 
course, he looked very tired. His articles on foreign affairs 
in the monthly Reviews took the premier place. 

Poulteney Bigelow was a character at the Authors' Club 
in those days. The son of an American Ambassador — 
minister, as they were then called — he was, for some reason 
or another, an intimate personal friend of the German Emperor, 
with whom he constantly stayed, and of whom he treasured 
many anecdotes. He once nearly persuaded the Emperor to 
dine at the Authors' Club. He disappeared for a while, and 
went out West in the United States again, from which he 
came back very full of the shooting exploits of Theodore 
Roosevelt, another of his friends. 

Bigelow always maintained that the Spanish-American 
war was the best thing which ever happened for the relations 
between Great Britain and the United States. He said that 
the garrison, who died like flies in the Philippines, were mostly 
drawn from the South-Western States, where the hatred 
of England had been liveliest, and their colonial experiences 
made them understand how considerate the English were to 
subject peoples, and how very inconsiderate subject peoples 
were apt to be to their rulers. 

We had quite a bevy of leading editors among our members, 
some of whom put in an appearance pretty constantly, but 
it never was a very active editor's club ; I think they were 
too afraid of would-be contributors. 

William Sinclair, the Archdeacon of London, who was the 
principal figure at London functions for nearly a generation, 
was a pillar of the Club. He was a constant attendant at 
its house dinners, and apart from his influence and position, 
was a brilliant raconteur. Sometimes, like a true Scotsman, 
he told a story against himself, as when he told us why he was 
such a popular preacher at the Guards' chapel — because the 



156 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

men said that he was the only person who ever preached to | 
them with a voice hke a sergeant-major. j 

Sinclair had met everybody of any importance in his time. \ 
He had one beautiful story of a Scotsman who suddenly became 1 
a Cabinet Minister on four or five thousand a year, and sported j 
a butler. Sinclair, who was staying with him, in all inno- 
cence asked what the man's name was, and his hostess said, ! 
"I don't know; we always call him waiter." 

After Besant's death, the two men who were most prominent 
at the Authors' Club were certainly Conan Doyle and Anthony 
Hope — Doyle especially, because he was for a long time chair- 
man of the Club, and a frequent attendant at the dinners. 
I wish I could remember only a tithe of the interesting and 
amusing things he said at that dinner table, for Doyle always 
says something memorable in his speeches. But once I was 
so interested that I kept a note of what he said written down 
on my menu card. It was about his famous pamphlet — 
The War ; its Causes and its Conduct. He told his audience 
that it came to him in an instant, like all great things in 
life, which hit on the head like a bullet. He was reading 
some peculiarly diabolical misrepresentations by the German 
editors. " Yet these men," he told himself, " were, in the 
ordinary affairs of life, honest men. Many books have been 
written from our standpoint ; but, in the first place, a German J 
editor cannot buy a book which costs six shillings or more, \ 
and in the second place, he has not got time to read through ' 
it. The only thing is to give him free of cost something ^ 
which he can read in an hour. My materials were all to ^ 
hand. I know how humane Tommy Atkins was to his t 
enemies, and I had been flooded with letters on the subject j 
in reply to an advertisement I had inserted in the newspapers, i 
Half-a-dozen things which have occurred to me in my life j 
must have been foreordained. j 

"At a small dinner that night I sat next to . I \ 

explained my project to him. ' How will you get the money ? ' i 
he asked. ' From the public' ' Well, I'll get a thousand i 
pounds for you.' j 

" Chance had thrown me against the man who knew every- j 
thing I wanted to know. He could even tell me the names of . 



THE AUTHORS' CLUB 157 

the people who could translate it into the various languages. 
Five months later I had the book on my table in twenty 
languages. Rich men gave their fifty pounds to the scheme, 
poor people scraped together their half-crowns to do their 
widow's-mites' worth for England. I sent that pamphlet 
to every man in Europe whose opinion counted. Leyds gave 
me the cue. It is astonishing how few people govern the 
public opinion of the world. In two countries an honest 
second edition was called for — Hungary and Portugal. In 
the latter, our old ally, there was a most kindly feeling for 
us, a genuine anxiety to learn the true facts of the case. 
In Germany the whole twenty thousand copies were distri- 
buted ; twelve thousand of them gratis, and eight sold. The 
Swiss actually printed an edition for themselves." 

He told us this on the night that we entertained him and 
Gilbert Parker in honour of their knighthood, and he told 
us how that morning a letter of congratulation from his 
gunsmith had arrived, addressed to " Sir Sherlock Holmes." 
The best thing he ever told us about Sherlock Holmes was 
its fate when he made a play of it, and sold it to a famous 
actor. The actor stipulated that he should be allowed to 
alter it as much as he liked, and when Doyle went to the 
rehearsals, he found that there was practically nothing of 
his play left except the title. That was all the actor really 
wanted to buy ; he had made his own play out of the Sherlock 
Holmes stories before he went to Doyle. 

It was at an Authors' Club dinner that Hall Caine made 
his awful disclosure about Londoners' insides. He said that 
no family could live in London for more than three generations 
unless its members went away for a change of air, and that 
the smoke-charged state of the atmosphere turned their insides 
from a healthy red to a slaty black. It was that same night 
that he recited his poem " Elian Vannin " to us. 

I remember, in the early days of the Authors' Club, J. M. 
Barrie telling the Club a story in the American story-teller's 
fashion. I don't suppose for an instant that it had actually 
happened. I expect it was just a hen trovato, but it was none 
the less amusing. He apologised for being late. He had been 
to the wrong club. He had never been to the Authors' 



158 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Club before, he said (though he was a member of the com- 
mittee), so he asked a pohceman the way. From the way 
in which he pronounced the word, the pohceman thought 
he meant Arthur's, which was quite near the Authors' Club 
when it was in its temporary premises in Park Place. When 
he got there he found it a very grand place, he said. The 
club porter looked him up and down, and said " The servants' 
entrance is round the corner." 

It took the moral courage of a Scotsman to tell that story 
— true or untrue. It was inimitably funny, told in the broad 
Doric of The Little Minister. 

Jerome actually had an experience of this sort in New York. 
But it was not due to the obtuseness of the club porter. 
He received a straight-out invitation from the servants of 
one of the great New York clubs to spend the evening with 
them. I suppose they have their story-tellers' nights like 
the members. He said that he never enjoyed himself more 
in his life.^ 

But the Club could never rise much above three hundred 
members. Many a time have G. Herbert Thring, the 
secretary, and I discussed with our board, consisting from 
time to time of Besant, Oswald Crawfurd, Lord Monkswell, 
Tedder, the literary executor of Herbert Spencer, Conan Doyle 
Anthony Hope, Hall Caine, Frankfort Moore, Morley Roberts, 
and Percy White, projects for bringing in more members. 

^ The Authors' Club, before it was reconstructed, contained a number of very 
representative members. Among them were Sir Walter Besant, Conan Doyle, 
Frankfort Moore, Hall Caine, Lindsay Bashford, R. D. Blumenfeld, F. T. 
BuUen, W. L. Courtney, S. R. Crockett, Sir Michael Foster, secretary of the 
Royal Society, J. Foster Fraser, Sydney Grundy, Charles Garvice, F. H. 
Gribble, H. A. Gwynne, the editor of the Morning Post, Major Arthur Griffiths, 
Rider Haggard, Cutcliffe Hyne, Anthony Hope, Clive Holland, Joseph 
Hocking, E. W. Hornung, Sir Henry Irving, J. K. Jerome, Henry Arthur 
Jones, Edward Jenks, who wrote that famous book Qinx's Baby, and was 
once M.P. for Hull, Rudyard Kipling, Otto Kyllman, Archdeacon Sinclair, 
Norman McColl, editor of the Athenceum, Prof. Meiklejohn, father of the V.C. 
who was kUled in putting a horse that could not jump at some railings in the 
Park to avoid running over a child; A. W. Marchmont, Bertram Mitford, 
J. Eveleigh Nash, Gilbert Parker, Barry Pain, J. M. Barrie, Max Pemberton, 
Sir J. Reimell Rodd, British Ambassador at Rome, Morley Roberts, Algernon 
Rose, who reconstituted the club, Bram Stoker, M. H. Spielmann, Prof. Skeat, 
the great etymologist, H. R. Tedder, the librarian of the Athenceum, Herbert 
Trench, Horace Annesley Vachell, W. H. Wilkins, Percy White, Lacon Watson, 
Horace Wyndham, and others. 



THE AUTHORS' CLUB 159 

The change from the temporary premises in Park Place 
behind St. James' Street, to the pleasant rooms overlooking 
the river, did something for us. But we were faced by a 
dilemma, which was that we had to widen the basis of our 
membership to get enough members to pay the huge rent of 
the premises, which we had taken for a term of years. If, 
instead of having these premises, we had hired a reading-room, 
and a smoking-room, and a dining-room in a hotel, we could 
have got the accommodation for a hundred a year, and as 
only a tithe of the Club ever used it, except on the nights 
when they were brought together by notice for the Club 
dinners, any premises would have been large enough ; the hotel 
would always have lent us a room of any size which we could 
fill for a dinner. The Whitefriars principle would have suited 
us admirably, and the Hotel Cecil would have made a good 
venue. But we had these premises on our hands, and we 
wanted a larger membership, not to fill them, but to make 
financial arrangements easier. I myself in my time enlisted 
no fewer than a hundred members for the Club. But that did 
not fill up the wastage. 

Thring saw the need of widening our basis as clearly as 
I did, but we never could carry our board with us to make an 
enlargement of the franchise sufficiently drastic, because they 
wished to be guided by the feeling of the men who used the 
Club most, and their feeling was decidedly against it — mainly, 
I beUeve, because they thought that the extra members we 
wanted to relieve the finances would make the Club too full 
to be restful. So in one way and another the old Club was 
drifting on to the rocks when Algernon Rose (with Charles 
Garvice as his chairman, and Cato Worsfold as honorary 
solicitor) took the matter in hand as honorary secretary. 
I did not see the throes. I was out of England on one of 
my wander-years. 

Rose, with a clear-sighted policy, boundless energy and 
self-sacrifice, and inexhaustible tact, not only pulled the Club 
out of the fire, but has made it one of the most flourishing 
organisations in London, with two hundred town members, 
three hundred suburban members, five hundred country 
members, and six hundred oversea members. He could 



160 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

easily have a thousand town members if he wanted them, 
but the town membership is strictly limited to two hundred, 
and the suburban to three hundred, because that is the limit 
of habitues which the premises can accommodate. Un- 
fortunately you can't have five-day members at an Authors' 
Club like you do at a Golf Club. 

And nowadays members use the Club in a way they never 
did when I was the honorary secretary and we exhausted our 
ingenuity in efforts to make the club more inhabited through 
the week. The increase of attendance at the Monday night 
dinners is one of the most wonderful things of all. Week 
after week they have enormous dinners, and Rose provides 
a brilliant succession of famous guests of the evening. The 
other Tuesday I read a report of an Authors' Club dinner in 
the Daily Telegraph which filled three columns.^ 

The Club retains practically all its old outstanding names, 
including that of Thring. Thring for many years was the 
Authors' Club personified. He not only conducted its busi- 
ness ; he peopled the club. Men went to lunch there because 
they knew they would meet Thring. They dropped in after 
business hours because they knew that Thring, at any rate, 
would be there. He kept the social life of the Club, as typified 
in the Club pools, and so on, going, and he was the friend of 
all the members, except those who desired to remain un- 
sociable. And, in consequence, he always had his finger on 
the pulse of the Club. 

The questions of club discipline which came up before the 
board in its early days were some of them of the most extra- 

^ Among the guests of the evening at the Authors' Club since Rose took it 
over have been musicians like Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir Walter Parratt, 
Sir Frederick Cowen, Mx. William H. Cummmgs, Sir Hubert Parry ; supreme 
scientists like Sir George Darwin, F.R.S., Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., Sir 
WiUiam Ramsay, F.R.S., Sir William Crookes, F.R.S., Prof. Schafer, F.R.S. ; 
great lawyers, like Lord Chancellor Halsbury, the late Lord Chief Justice, 
and Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton; men who have been great outside the 
Empire like Sir Robert Hart, and Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking, and Mr. F. C. 
Selous, the mighty himter; great politicians, like Lord Milner, and Lord 
Wemyss ; great explorers, like Sir Ernest Shackleton ; great artists, like the late 
Sir Hubert von Herkomer ; distinguished foreigners, like the American Ambas- 
sadors, Whitelaw-Reid and Page ; well-known literary men, like Harold Cox, 
secretary of the Cobden Society, Maarten Maartens, Sir Owen Seaman, Sir 
Sidney Lee, W. B. Maxwell; and great actors, like Sir Herbert Beerbohm 
Tree. 



THE AUTHORS' CLUB 161 

ordinary nature. One man hated hearing clocks tick, and 
whenever he was left alone in a room always stopped the 
clock. Somebody else wished to have him turned out of 
the Club, but the Chairman said he did not see how it could 
be regarded as ungentlemanly behaviour, and proposed that 
no action should be taken, but that we should take it in 
turns never to leave the honourable member alone ! 

The Rev. John Watson, who, under the pen-name of 
" Ian Maclaren," suddenly burst into fame with Beside the 
Bonnie Brier Bush when he was forty-four years old, was a 
Liverpool clergyman, the minister of the Sefton Park Presby- 
terian Church. He had long enjoyed a reputation in his 
circle in Liverpool for story-telling and as a public speaker. 
His speeches were as good as his stories, and admirably 
delivered. His personal charm was as great as the respect 
in which he was held. He was very humorous. He told us 
one night, when he was our guest at the Authors' Club, that 
his boy at Rugby had said to him, " Father, I suppose that 
your books are all right to some people, or you would not 
be able to do so much for us. But couldn't you write some- 
thing which would be good enough for me to show the other 
chaps ? " 

One wonders if this was the boy who is now the head of 
Nisbet's great publishing house. If it was, how pleased he 
would be to have the publication of some of the books that 
were not good enough " to show the other chaps ! " 



CHAPTER XIII 

LITERARY CLUBS : THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 

At the beginning the Authors' Club had no exact rivals, 
but there were two institutions, very much intertwined, which 
came near it in a way — the Vagabonds Club and the Idler 
teas. The Vagabonds Club, in its conception, had been a little 
coterie of authors who met in the rooms of their friend, the 
blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston; but before I came back 
from America Marston was dead, and the coterie had been 
turned into a small dining-club, which used to take eighteen- 
penny dinners at cheap restaurants, and in theory drank beer 
and smoked clay pipes. The committee included Jerome, C. N. 
Williamson and F. W. Robinson, and the Club had among 
its members, besides those just mentioned, Conan Doyle, 
Israel Zangwill, Anthony Hope, Bernard Partridge, Dudley 
Hardy, Phil May, Hal Hurst, Rudolph Blind, Pett Ridge, 
Joe Hatton, Robert Barr, Coulson Kernahan, W. L. Alden, 
Hall Caine, Sir Alfred East, E. W. Hornung, Sir Gilbert 
Parker, J. M. Barrie, Barry Pain, Arthur Morrison, Solomon 
J. Solomon, and, of course, George Burgin, the original and 
indefatigable secretary. 

Of these people Jerome and Barr were editors of the Idler, 
Burgin was sub-editor, Doyle, Zangwill, Pett Ridge and 
Anthony Hope were its favourite contributors. The Idler, 
in those days published by Chatto & Windus, was edited 
in a flat in Arundel Street, Strand, and there every week, on 
Wednesday afternoons, as far as I remember, the editors 
gave a tea at which they welcomed their contributors, and 
any friends whom contributors chose to bring with them, and 
the friends of these friends thereafter. It was like the snow- 
ball system of selling umbrellas in the United States. 

The teas were of the simplest. I do not think we had any- 
162 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 163 

thing except bread and butter and tea, but nobody wanted 
more ; it was sufficient that here was the common meeting- 
ground for men and women, where you might, and often did, 
meet the ablest young authors of the day. I should say that 
the Idler teas were the first literary gatherings in London 
attended by Weyman and Crockett, and they certainly were 
the first attended by Anthony Hope, W. W. Jacobs and 
Frankfort Moore. 

We received the warmest welcome at the Idlers, because 
there were many literary Americans in London just then, 
and both Jerome and Barr were insistent that I should bring 
as many as possible of them to their teas. 

At those teas the principal occupation was introducing 
every freshcomer to as many people as possible, as the hosts 
do at American at-homes ; and Jerome made a good many of 
his arrangements for articles and illustrations with the people 
who came to the teas. It was characteristic of the Idler and 
Vagabond gatherings to talk shop and do business without 
any pretence of concealment. 

Hal Hurst and Dudley Hardy were two of Jerome's 
favourite illustrators. Other artists who were there a great 
deal were Robert Sauber, John Giilich, Lewis Baumer, Fred 
Pegram, James Greig, Paxton, A. S. Hartrick, Louis Wain, 
who almost always drew cats with human expressions, a 
little man named Martin Anderson, who called himself 
" Cynicus," and had an allegorical vein of humour. He won 
himself undying popularity here by bringing to one of those 
teas a charmingly pretty young American, who was soon to 
feel her footing as a writer. She had not yet written The 
Barnstormers. This was Alice Livingston, who is now 
known to all the world as Mrs. C. N. Williamson. Townsend, 
the present art-editor of Punch ; Chris and Gertrude Hammond, 
who were among the most charming book-illustrators of that 
day; Seppings Wright, the naval war correspondent; Holland 
Tringham, Melton Prior, Fred Villiers and many other 
artists came constantly. 

The great advantage of those Idler teas was that women 
as well as men could be present, and in those days women 
were not considered worthy to be admitted to authors' 



164 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

banquets, except at the annual function of the Authors' 
Society. Of course, you had the chance of meeting women 
authors at the at-homes of the Pioneer, Writers', and Gros- 
venor Crescent Clubs, because they were all ladies' institu- 
tions. But at their entertainments you met only a very 
few men of any importance, and not particularly many 
women of literary importance, other than journalistic. They 
were more interested in women's movements — the Pioneer 
might almost be called the ancestor of the Suffragettes. ^ 

The conversations at the Idler teas were very shoppy. I 
remember being introduced to Ellen Fowler as the woman 
whose witty sayings had long been the delight of the exalted 
circles in which she moved, and who had been induced by the 
various leading authors whoin she knew to write a book. 
This is the sort of laudation which we professional authors 
often hear and usually distrust. But the book happened to 
be Concerning Isabel Carnaby, and when I learned that the 
circle which she had dazzled was the circle in which the 
Liberal leaders moved, since she was the daughter of Sir 
Henry Fowler, M.P., afterwards Lord Wolverhampton, I 
understood that she certainly would have received an encour- 
agement to write books from the authors and critics who 
were admitted to Front Bench Liberal dinners. 

Mona Caird, whom we met often at the Women's Clubs 
afterwards, did much for the emancipation of women in 
those days, for she was not only clear-sighted and convincing 
in what she said and wrote, but she had a winning personality 
which commanded the sympathies of those who were not 
predisposed to share her views. 

It was at an Idler tea that I first met George Bennett 
Burgin, with whom I was to be so intimately connected for 
so many years as joint Hon. Secretary of the New Vagabonds 
Club. He was the sub-editor of the famous Idler Magazine, 
and his tact and geniality were constantly in requisition, for 
the pugnacity of his chiefs was proverbial, and some of the 
best contributors were equally pugnacious. 

1 Among the eminent women whom I remember seemg at the Idlers were 
Marie Corelli, Mona Caird, Mi-s. Sidgwick (Mis. Andrew Dean), ]Mis. Campbell 
Praed, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Meynell, 
Miss Montresor, Lucas Malet and Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler. 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 165 

I forget if it was a recognised part of the proceedings at 
the Old Vagabond dinners to have a set subject for discussion. 
Some one always did get up and make a short speech, and in 
a club which had men like Jerome and Zangwill and Barry 
Pain to draw on, the speaking was always witty, unless the 
subject forbade it. The chief difference was that people did 
not discuss the speech by getting on their legs to fire witticisms 
at the speaker. They discussed it where they sat, sometimes 
talking to each other about it (or anything else), sometimes 
raising their voices to question the man who had been speak- 
ing, or to argue with him. 

There was much less discussion of the subject than there 
was talking of shop. The point of the gatherings was that 
a number of brilliant young authors and artists dined together 
fraternally once a month. 

It was a great boon to me suddenly to be received into the 
intimacy of some of the busiest and best-known authors and 
editors and black-and-white artists of the day, to hear and 
take part in their " shop." ^ 

Burgin, the hon. secretary of the Old Vagabonds Club, who 
was once private secretary to Sir Samuel Baker in Constanti- 
nople and Asia Minor, and has been a great traveller in recent 
years, was sub-editor of the Idler Magazine until 1899. 
Since then he has given himself up to novel-writing, gardening 
and the control of literary clubs. One of his novels. Shutters 
of Silence, has been through thirty editions. His books 
are distinguished alike by uncommon vivacity and by excep- 
tional skill in using local colour. They are very good indeed, 
and if they had their rights would be among the most popular 
books of the day. 

I have made several attempts to discover when the original 

Vagabonds Club was actually started, and the best account 

I have had of it was from Kernahan, one of the oldest members. 

I certainly did not join it till about five years later. 

1 This Idler and Vagabond set included, besides those mentioned above, 
Anthony Hope, Frankfort Moore, Israel Zangwill, Eden Phillpotts, C. N. 
Williamson, F. W. Robinson, Joseph Hatton, Coulson Kernahan, George 
Manville Fenn, G. A. Henty, W. Pett Ridge, H. G. Wells, Frederic Villiers, 
Henry Arthur Jones, Francis Gribble, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur A. Beckett, 
William Watson, John Davidson, H. Breakstad the Norwegian, and Carl 
Hentschel, the founder of the old Playgoers Club. 



166 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

He writes — 

" Marston died February 14, 1887, Valentine's Day. Yes, 
I was one of those who visited his rooms, 191 Euston Road. 
When he founded the Club I do not exactly know. I 
fancy it had only just been started when, at his invitation, I 
joined in 1886. We dined at Pagani's and then adjourned 
to his rooms, keeping it up very late. After he died the 
Club practically ceased, as it was he who ran it. Then I 
think Herbert Clark proposed that we should continue meeting 
and call ourselves the Marston Club — not a good name, as I 
always held, for it gave the idea that it was like the Browning 
club or society, for the study of his poems, whereas it was 
merely a gathering of Marston's old friends. All the same, 
lots of interesting men came to it. His father. Dr. Westland 
Marston, for one. So things went on for a long time, and the 
thing was dropping to pieces for want of some one to work it, 
until you came along, put us in the shop window, and, lo and 
behold, the old Club became a new force." 

It was not so very long after I joined the Club that it fell 
on evil days, not, I hope, because I joined it, but because 
it contained Socialists, who are apt to wreck things. The 
course they took was most revolutionary. There were two 
of them on the committee, and they insisted on having 
committee meetings, which insisted on having a voice in the 
management of the Club. 

The Club would not stand it; it transformed itself into a 
New Vagabonds Club without the offending members. I 
took a leading part in the transformation. I became asso- 
ciated with Burgin in the honorary secretaryship because 
I persuaded a hundred well-known men, like Crockett and 
Weyman and Reginald Cleaver, to join the Club, and we 
retained the old committee, minus the impossibles, and 
strengthened by the inclusion of Frankfort Moore and Joe 
Hatton. And this was a well-behaved committee, because 
I do not think it met once during its whole existence of not 
far short of twenty years. Burgin and I were the honorary 
secretaries and managers, and we used to decide everything, 
without even thinking of the committee, who, as reformed, 
had only one idea in their heads, which was that they were 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 167 

not to be bothered unless there was some real necessity 
for it. 

Our most successful dinner, at which about six hundred 
people were present, was held in honour of Field-Marshal 
Lord Roberts — the idol of the nation. Lord Roberts has a 
wonderful memory, not only for faces, but for the records 
which go with the faces. When I met him the other night 
at the Authors' Society dinner, of which likewise he was 
the guest, he took me by the arm, and whispered, " Isn't 
Who's Who getting very fat? " which was his way of show- 
ing that he remembered that I was the author of Who's Who 
in its present form — or, rather, in the form which it bore from 
1897 to 1899, when its figure was not so middle-aged. 

That Vagabond dinner to Lord Roberts was in honour of 
the publication of his celebrated Forty-One Years in India, 
and the Authors' Society dinner to him was also in its honour, 
though so many years later. 

Jerome took the chair to Lord Roberts at the Vagabonds. 
He was very interested in Forty-One Years in India. He 
had commissioned me to write the long review of it in the 
Idler, and I am sure that he and the Field-Marshal, V.C., 
though looking at everything from an exactly opposite 
standpoint, got on like a house on fire. 

The dinner to Lord Roberts was the very largest we ever 
had, though the lunches to Sarah Bernhardt and to Sir 
Henry Irving were about as numerously attended. Irving 
made himself perfectly charming, but when he came to reply 
to the toast to his health, the audience were confronted by 
the curious phenomenon that the first actor in Europe was 
totally unable to make himself heard even half-way across 
the hall, and if they could have heard what he said, they 
would have been confronted by the equally curious fact that 
he was no speaker. That, however, is nothing — very few 
actors can speak, always excepting my friend. Tree, who, if 
he is in the mood, brings the house down time after time with 
his naivete. 

There were few eighteen- carat dramatic celebrities whom 
we did not entertain at the Vagabonds — Irving and Sarah 
Bernhardt, Wyndham and Mary Moore, the Trees and Mrs. 



168 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Patrick Campbell, the Bourehiers and the Maudes, the young 
livings, and Lena Ashwell, occur to me first. 

Sarah Bernhardt's appearance was a very memorable one. 
Mr. Balfour was in the chair. He was Prime Minister at 
the time, and had important business at the House of Com- 
mons that afternoon. Sarah was three-quarters of an hour 
late. I, who had charge of the guests, while Burgin was 
making sure that all his orders for a banquet of five hundred 
people had been carried out, felt more nervous than I had 
ever felt in my life at the slight which was being offered to 
so great a man. I racked my brain for adequate apologies, 
but Mr. Balfour said, with his perfect manners, " Please don't 
worry yourself about that, Mr. Sladen. Tell me about 
Japan." 

If Sarah was as great as he was in other respects, she 
certainly was not as great in this respect, for a day or two 
afterwards, T. P. O'Connor asked Sarah and Mortimer Menpes, 
and Norma Lorimer and myself, to have tea with some 
M.P.s on the terrace of the House of Commons. We duly 
arrived — even Sarah was fairly punctual — and were herded 
in the lobby of the House, like people waiting to see the 
editor in a newspaper office, while a search was made for 
T. P. O'Connor. He could not be found anywhere, and a 
long time passed. I do not know how long it was, but it 
seemed years, because Sarah was so angry. She had expected 
to be met at the door with due ceremony — perhaps the leaders 
of both parties, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker — but 
nobody met her at all, and none of us could speak French 
well enough to understand the unmeasured language she was 
using about O'Connor. Finally, she lost her temper alto- 
gether, and though she had told me on several occasions that 
she could not speak English, she was quite equal to telling 
us in our own language what she thought of T. P. Finally, 
some wholly unsuitable member of the Irish party — Dillon, 
or somebody just as gloomy — came, waving a telegram. 
O'Connor, it appeared, had been caught in a railway accident 
coming back from the Henley Regatta, miles from a telegraph 
office. As soon as he got to a place where he could telegraph 
from, he did telegraph, but Sarah was not appeased, even 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 169 

though Menpes offered to go to her island off the coast of 
Brittany and arrange a Japanese room for her, 

I remember a similar contretemps, almost equally amusing, 
when George Cawston, one of the directors of the Chartered 
Company, gave a great supper at Willis's rooms in honour 
of a South African millionaire. He invited a number of 
eminent people to meet him — politicians, soldiers, authors, 
actors, artists and public people generally, most of whom 
knew each other. The millionaire, who was very " swollen- 
headed," was shamelessly late. So, finally, Cawston decided 
to begin without him. The people made up parties, and 
sat down at the various little tables, and enjoyed the munifi- 
cent supper, and finally went away not knowing or caring 
whether the millionaire had been there or not. They had 
most of them never heard of him. 

Sarah came to us a year later to a huge afternoon reception, 
which we got up in her honour, and she honoured us by 
giving us a long and magnificent recitation from UAiglon 
(which she had just produced), in which she was supported 
by her leading man. 

We entertained other famous soldiers besides Lord Roberts, 
such as Lord Dundonald, when he came back from the great 
exploit of his life, the relief of Ladysmith, and Sir Ian Hamilton. 
Cecil Raleigh, I remember, took the chair to Sir Ian Hamil- 
ton, and showed his versatility by making a really admirable 
speech. I do not remember who it was who took the chair 
to Lord Dundonald, but he told a characteristic story of Lord 
Dundonald in his earlier service in Egypt. 

When the news of the fall of Khartum reached the army 
which might have relieved Khartum, if Sir Charles Wilson had 
pushed on, taking the risks as Lord Roberts would have taken 
them, after the victory of Abu Klea, the General asked for an 
officer to volunteer to carry the dispatches to Sir Redvers 
Buller at the base. It was necessary to have some one with 
a knowledge of astronomy, because he had to find his way 
across the desert, to avoid the great loop of the Nile above 
the Second Cataract. There were many men who would have 
risked the dangers of meeting wandering parties of dervishes, 
but there was only one of the force who was not only prepared 



170 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

to take the risk, but possessed the requisite astronomical 
knowledge, and that was Lord Cochrane, a subaltern in the 
2nd Life Guards, the future Lord Dundonald. He carried 
out his mission, and in an incredibly small number of hours 
presented the dispatches to Sir Redvers, whom he found sleep- 
ing under a palm tree. As soon as he had delivered them, 
he collapsed with exhaustion. 

He is a grandson, of course, of the immortal frigate Com- 
mander, the fighting Lord Cochrane, the Almirante Cochrane 
who was the liberator of South America, and is a distinguished 
inventor. He invented the pocket heating apparatus for 
soldiers to carry when doing sentry work in cold climates, 
the extra light carriages used for machine-guns in the Boer 
War, and the apparatus for enabling cavalry soldiers to turn 
out ready for duty as quickly as firemen. 

From time to time we entertained distinguished ecclesiastics 
such as the late and the present Bishops of London and the 
ex-Bishop of Ripon. Creighton was much the best guest of 
the three, for he had a most saving gift of humour. 

For some reason or other, on the night that he was with us, 
at the conclusion of his speech returning thanks for the 
way in which his health has been proposed, he had to propose 
the toast of journalism, coupled with the name of the editor 
of The Times. He said, " I do not know much about news- 
papers; I read so few of them. I have only one test for 
them, and that is their suitability for wrapping up shooting 
boots. And, judged by this standard. The Times is the best 
newspaper." 

It was not easy to get the better of Creighton, with his 
humour to back up his wisdom and firmness. But my dear 
old friend, the late Father Stanton, who was a frequent 
visitor to Vagabond entertainments with F. E. Sidney, once 
got the better of him, and he was very amusing in telling the 
story of it. 

Creighton, it appears, went to a service of Stanton's, 
because he wished to wean him from certain ritualistic prac- 
tices. After the service was over, they had a talk in the 
vestry, which was quite cordial, because Creighton knew 
the essential greatness and goodness of Stanton's character. 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 171 

Stanton, who was very astute and tactful about getting his 
own way, and yet avoiding trouble with his Bishop, adroitly 
kept the conversation away from dangerous points, and 
finally the Bishop gave up, and called for his carriage. Stanton 
escorted him to the carriage door, and as he was driving off, 
Creighton got out what he had come to say. 

" I don't like that incense of yours, Stanton," 

" Nor do I, my lord, it's wretched stuff — only three and 
sixpence a pound, but I can't afford any better." 

" Do without it, Stanton, do without it altogether," said 
the Bishop. 

Lord Charles Beresford was another of our guests, and so 
was Admiral Lambton. Both of them made a violent attack 
on Bridge, which they said was sapping the energy of the 
nation by the awful waste of time to which it led. 

Beresford was very amusing. He said, " The Navy is 
the finest thing in the world for a man. If I hadn't been in 
the Navy, I should have been in prison." 

I only once saw Beresford seriously put out, and that was 
when he had to speak after that great man, Seddon, the 
Premier of New Zealand, whose patriotic attitude about the 
Boer War counted for so much in making the democratic 
colonies support the mother country so splendidly against the 
Boers. Seddon, like other New Zealanders I have known, could 
make a great speech, but did not know when he had used up 
all he had to say. In the first part of that speech for the 
Vagabonds, he began with great eclat, and then maundered 
on and on about " Womman," as he pronounced her generic 
name, while Beresford grew so impatient that when his 
turn came to speak he excused himself with a few witty 
sentences about their having heard so much good speaking. 

Seddon brought two charming daughters with him, and one 
of them made a felicitous retort to a maladroit person who 
condoled with her on her father's not having been knighted 
like the leader of the Conservative Opposition in New Zealand, 
Sir William Russell, whose name had appeared in the Gazette 
of the day before. 

" I don't mind," she said; " Billy's a darling." 

Norman Angell, the apostle of peace, in books like his 



172 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

famous The Great Illusion, and also the Daily Mail corre- 
spondent of Paris, was our guest on one occasion. 

The most unexpected turns happened at times. One 
night we had an athletic dinner, with C. B. Fry and Eustace 
Miles for our chief guests, and Pett Ridge in the chair. There 
was hardly a word talked about athletics the whole evening, 
for Pett Ridge is most interested in work among the poor, 
and so are Fry and Miles, and the speeches related almost 
entirely to the serious side of the humorist and the athletes. 
The world at large did not know how earnest Fry is about 
good works until he refused to go to Australia in the all- 
England Eleven because he could not leave his work on 
naval training for boys until a certain sum was raised for the 
training-ship. In those days it regarded him merely as one 
of the greatest batsmen ever seen, and the only man who had 
ever had five blues at the university, and been captain or 
president of the university in three different kinds of games. 
Some of them remembered too, that he was a Scholar of his 
College, and got a First. None of them, I am quite sure, 
knew that he would have been unable to go to Oxford at all, 
because he had no money to go on, except his scholarship at 
Wadham, if he had not borrowed the money, and repaid it 
out of his own earnings after he left the university. Could 
anything be more magnificent than that the man who holds 
the record of all Englishmen, and for that matter, that of all 
recorded men, for achievements in games, should have paid 
for himself at the university? Yet there were some people 
in the Club that night who expressed their disapproval to me 
at the Club's entertaining a mere athlete ! 

But there were many more who expressed their disapproval 
of our entertaining Christabel Pankhurst as our guest of the 
evening — most of them ardent Radicals, who disliked the 
practical jokes of the suffragettes upon Cabinet ministers. 
We Conservatives felt no more sympathy for people who do 
idiotic damage, but were more tolerant. I did not propose 
the toast, although I was in the chair, and have always 
desired to give the vote to women with the proper qualifica- 
tions. I called upon an old friend, a very successful barrister, 
whom I suspect of being an ardent Liberal, though he is 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 173 

an ardent suffragist — Fordham Spence — to propose it. He 
made the kind of points which could not fail to enlist the 
sympathies of a popular audience — asking which of the men 
who were present would have the pluck to go to prison and 
starve themselves for a principle, as these women did. He 
pointed dramatically to our guest, a pretty, slim girl, who 
hardly looked out of her teens, and told us what she had done. 
He was the clever advocate all through ; he begged the ques- 
tion almost as flagrantly as Miss Pankhurst herself, when 
she got up to reply to the toast. 

I prefer to hear the arguments of the suffragists stated in 
the dispassionate way in which Mrs. Fawcett states them, 
pure appeals to reason and justice, stated without any at- 
tempts to draw red herrings across the trail — in fact, stated 
by a judge, instead of pleaded by an advocate. I think they 
would be difficult to resist. The weak point of the militant 
suffragettes is that they not only do things of which moderate 
people cannot approve, to attract the public attention, but 
they have no consideration for our commonsense; they talk 
to us like Socialists talk to a mob in Trafalgar Square, not 
as a great Scientist, like Lord Kelvin, would address the 
British Association. That is the convincing way. 

I do not know if Miss Pankhurst made many converts to 
the cause that night; she certainly made many personal 
friends. An hour or two later I met her at a supper given by 
Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Mappin at the Savoy, and had the good 
fortune to sit next to her once more. She was off duty then, 
and saying that she really must begin to play games again to 
keep her " fit " for her work. 

Two of the most successful dinners we ever had were to 
Captain Scott, the Antarctic explorer, and Ernest Thompson 
Seton. At the Scott dinner the great hall of the Hotel 
Cecil was packed to its utmost limits, though it was not due 
to any premonition that he might not come back. Before 
Scott perished^the world had got into the idea that Arctic 
and Antarctic exploration was not really so dangerous as 
going out with a friend who was learning to drive a car. But 
Scott had such an irresistible personality ; he looked the very 
type of man whose courage and resourcefulness and indomit- 



174 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

able endurance would get him and those who depended on 
him out of the tightest place. And he would have got his 
party through if the supplies in the hut had been left at their 
proper strength. Scott was one of those blue-eyed men 
who can meet any danger with a smile, and are absolutely 
devoid of fear. I never knew a man for whom I had a more 
instinctive liking, or to whom I should so naturally turn for 
support when facing death. Few men are such an asset to 
their race as he was. 

Ernest Thompson Seton held his audience as no other 
Vagabond guest has ever done. The born naturalist and the 
natural orator are combined in him. He made a lecture, 
which had probably done duty several times as a lecture, do 
duty for his personal reply to the proposal of his health; it 
did not betray its origin, and yet it was a moving plea for the 
whole brute creation ; he invested the lower animals, probably 
unjustly, with all sorts of human traits and human feelings, 
and made the audience feel for them as they feel for the 
hero or heroine in a tragedy. It was really wonderful; I 
never heard such a mixture of ingenuity and eloquence, or 
a speech more thrillingly delivered. He is the apostle of 
animated Nature. 

I was abroad when the Club entertained Lord Curzon and 
Winston Churchill and Lord Leighton, but I was present 
when Lord Willoughby de Broke made such a popular guest. 
The position was rather a difficult one; not having noticed 
the views which Jerome had been expressing on the House 
of Lords to the local yokels, I asked him to take the chair, 
because he was the most successful playwright in the club — 
he had just produced The Third Floor Back — and our guest 
was one of the best amateur actors. Jerome's speech was 
not marked by his usual verve ; like Balaam, he had come to 
curse, and he was so won over by the splendid manliness of 
the guest that he was unable to do anything but bless. Lord 
Willoughby de Broke would doubtless have given us a much 
more entertaining evening if Jerome had spoken of him to us 
as he spoke of his fellow-peers to the yokels, for no one is so 
ready with a retort. Who does not remember his retort at 
the meeting which he was addressing in favour of Mr. Balfour. 




G. B. BURGIN 

Drawn by Yoshio Markiuo 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 175 

He was saying something in praise of him, when a voice at 
the back called out " Rats ! " He smiled sweetly — " I was 
speaking of Mr. Balfour," he said, " not of the first Lord of 
the Admiralty." 

Later on, at that same meeting, a heckler asked him where 

he got his title, and was told " just where you got your d d 

ugly face — from my father." 

He gave us some pretty flashes of wit that night, but not 
of the scathing order which makes him one of the protagonists 
who fight against Home Rule. With his physical strength 
and activity, his dauntless courage, and his power of swaying 
great assemblages with his speeches, he is a born leader. 

There were few well-known literary men and women in 
the London of the time who were not guests of the Vagabonds 
Club. The best speech we ever had from a woman author 
was, I think, from Flora Annie Steel, who, contrary to the 
habit of most speakers, explained to start with that she was 
likely to make a very good speech because we had taken her 
unexpectedly, and she was very angry with the last speaker — 
whom she proceeded to mince. 

But charming Mrs. Craigie, " John Oliver Hobbes," made 
us a very fascinating one when she was our guest of the 
evening. That was the night on which she complained that 
people persisted in identifying her with her heroines, espe- 
cially with the kind of heroine whom a woman does not wish 
to be suspected of drawing from herself, like her " Anne " 
(I think in The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham). 

Anthony Hope, who was the next speaker, complained that 
he had never had such luck, that he had been hoping ever 
since he wrote The Prisoner of Zenda that somebody would 
confuse him with Rupert of Hentzau, but that no critic had 
ever obliged him. 

Once, at any rate, he was the guest of the Club, and he 
occupied the chair, I should say, nearly every year during 
its existence. I wish I had kept a record of the bons mots 
which never failed to adorn his speeches. One of them comes 
to my mind as I write these words; he said that the reason 
why England and the United States were not better friends 
arose from their inability to understand each other's humour. 



176 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

He and Conan Doyle were the mainstays of our chair at 
the New Vagabonds. Doyle may have taken it even oftener 
than he did. He was the chairman we instinctively chose 
for a great occasion, like that on which we had Lord Roberts 
for our guest, though he did not actually take the chair that 
night, for we could rely upon him to say the generous and 
dignified words which would express the feelings of the Club, 
as he did in proposing the health of Lord Roberts at the 
Authors' Society dinner, when he said that Lord Roberts 
was the one guest who, short of royalty, must always take 
the first place in any gathering of his countrymen, the first, 
not only in rank and distinction, but in the grateful love and 
veneration of Englishmen. 

Doyle was in the chair at the farewell dinner which the 
Club gave in honour of Burgin and myself at the Connaught 
Rooms, and said just exactly the right things to make us 
feel very proud, and to voice the regret of the Club at meeting 
for the last time. The Club did not exactly die, because it 
was amalgamated with the O.P. Club. 

Carl Hentschel was a very prominent member of both clubs, 
and when Burgin and I were unable to carry on the Vagabonds 
any longer, he very kindly came forward, and was willing either 
to take over the honorary secretaryship of the Vagabonds, or 
to amalgamate the two clubs. Finally, seeing that Bohemians 
had more dining clubs than they had the leisure to attend, we 
decided in favour of amalgamation, and there is some talk 
now of the Playgoers combining with them both. 

George Grossmith was one of our best members. We had 
him as a guest, and he often gave us an entertainment. One 
of his most felicitous efforts was when he proposed his own 
health, and was very sarcastic about himself. But that 
was a favourite vein of humour with him. Those who were 
at the great party which he and Weedon gave at the Grafton 
Galleries will remember the story of the clergyman's wife 
who was getting up a bazaar, and suggested that they should 
ask George Grossmith to give them a performance, because 
he was such a fool — " You can always get him to do things for 
nothing," she explained, and added, " The best of him is 
that he can be humorous without being funny." 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 177 

She was right about his being generous; that was always 
characteristic of George Grossmith. 

Bill Nye distinguished himself in an equally original 
manner when he was the guest of the evening. It was 
Independence Day, and he had enjoyed such a reception 
from the American colony that he was sleepy, to say the least 
of it, before he reached the New Vagabonds. Not one word 
could the chairman get out of him during the dinner, but no 
sooner had the chairman said, " Gentlemen, you may smoke," 
than Nye got up and returned thanks for all the handsome 
things which had been said about him. He spoke at great 
length, and with the greatest fluency, and it was only with 
considerable difficulty that he could be stopped. He is the 
only man I ever remember to have come to one of the dinners 
so tired, though I have seen others unbend as the evening 
grew old ; and it was entirely due to the accident of his arriving 
in London on Independence Day. And, as poor Phil May 
said, of course, your tongue does sometimes run away with 
you, when you are on your legs. 

Arthur Diosy (the son of that Martin Diosy who was 
secretary of the Hungarian Revolution), who was chairman of 
the Japan Society for years, had talked so learnedly about 
Japan, and had mouthed the Japanese names so lovingly, 
that every one imagined that he had been in Japan for at 
least half his lifetime. Most people went further, and, not 
knowing that the Hungarians were Mongols who conquered 
parts of Europe a thousand years ago, imagined, from the 
Mongolian type in his features, of which, as a Hungarian, he 
was so proud, that he was a Japanese. Even the name did 
pretty well if you spelt it wrong. When he did go to Japan 
for the first time, and received an enormous welcome from the 
Japanese authorities as the founder of the Japan Society, 
and the practical originator of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 
we, his fellow-members of the Vagabond Club, gave him a 
dinner in honour of the event. 

I am an original member of the Japan Society, and had the 
honour of giving them their opening address in the season of 
1912. 

We had a very interesting guest in Sir George Scott Robert- 



178 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

son, the doctor who was knighted for his successful defence 
of Chitral when the combatant officers were all hors de combat. 
Robertson not only wrote his name on the golden roll of the 
besieged who have endured to the end and who have prevailed, 
but he gave us one of the best speeches we had ever heard 
at the Club. He told us marvels of his other claim on his 
country — his exploration of Kafiristan, a country which 
had kept its population pure from other strains, and had 
preserved unique monuments until, in our own generation, 
the Afghans began to absorb it, and he proved himself a 
great orator, with a well of biblical English flowing into his 
impromptu speech. 

Sir Edward Ward we entertained for his share in another 
and yet more memorable defence, for it was to him, more 
than anybody else, that England owes the preservation 
of Ladysmith. He foresaw what was coming, and before it 
was too late got on the track of everything edible and potable 
in Ladysmith; he made the horses, which were not going to 
be of any use, into chevril, a horsey form of Bovril, and if 
the siege had gone on much longer, he would have found a 
way of making swpremes out of old boot-soles. He made 
the provisions last by his foresight and administrative capacity, 
and he was almost as invaluable with his indomitable pluck 
and cheeriness. He was for years Permanent Secretary of 
War, and it is a mighty pity that he is not Secretary 
of State for War, for which his unparalleled knowledge 
of Army administration and his robust commonsense would 
make him the ideal appointment. No detail is too small 
for Ward to attend to it; no person is too small for him 
to listen to courteously and patiently. He made a great 
impression on the Vagabonds, for he has an Irishman's wit 
in speaking, and is most soldierly looking, a man of Herculean 
build. 

Sir George Reid, the High Commissioner of Australia, is 
one of the best speakers we had at the Club ; he is very witty 
when he is witty, and from time to time turns serious with 
marked effect. I had known him many years before he came 
to the Vagabond dinner; I made his acquaintance in the 
early 'eighties, when I held the Chair of History in the 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 179 

University at Sydney, and he was the only Free-trader of 
any influence in Austraha. Since then he has been the 
Premier of Federated Austraha, and now most worthily 
represents the Commonwealth, for he has impressed on the 
Government that he is a force to be reckoned with, even 
where the colonies are only vaguely affected. 

In decided contrast to him was the Princess Bariatinsky — 
Lydia Yavorska, the Russian actress who married a cousin 
of the Czar. We entertained her as a recognition of her 
splendid acting in Ibsen's DolVs-House, where her foreign 
accent was no drawback, and her tragic power had scope. 

There are other Vagabond dinners which, I remember, 
went off with much eclat, though I cannot recall their inci- 
dents — dinners to great sailors like Lord Charles Beresford 
and Lambton, now Meux, and Shackleton of Antarctic fame, 
dinners to great soldiers like Sir Evelyn Wood; dinners to 
great artists like Lord Leighton and Sir Alma Tadema and 
Linley Sambourne, all, unfortunately, now dead, and J. J. 
Shannon, still with us and still young; dinners to great 
actors like Ellen Terry and Tree, Wyndham and Mary Moore 
and the younger Irvings and the Bourchiers and the Asches 
and Forbes-Robertson and Lena Ashwell; and dinners to 
great authors like Doyle, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Hall Caine, 
H. G. Wells, Mrs. Burnett, Jerome, W. L. Courtney and 
Robert Barr. They were all great occasions, with two, three 
or four hundred present, but readers will wish to be spared 
the details of dinners to perfectly well-known people unless 
they brought out some fresh trait, or some priceless anecdote. 

It is to be hoped that the Vagabond dinners will come to 
life again, not on the huge and expensive scale which is going 
out of vogue, but little meetings of really eminent people 
gathered at some restaurant in Soho, to eat a dinner which 
reminds them of joyous Bohemian days in Paris or Italy, and 
to enjoy the pleasures of a general conversation upon the 
topics of Bohemia, such as we used to have in the days when 
we met as men only (which we will never do again), before 
we were reformed Vagabonds. 

The Argonauts, a little dining club which Frankfort 
Moore and I founded, before the Vagabonds allowed ladies 



180 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

at their dinners, to dine every Sunday or every other Sun- 
day at Mrs. Robertson's tea and luncheon rooms in Bond 
Street, where we had our club-room, would give a good 
example to follow. We seldom had a guest or speeches. A 
number of well-known people used to dine together for the 
pleasure of each other's company. We left our places as 
soon as we had finished dinner, and broke up into little knots 
to converse. There you really could see your friends, and 
introduce interesting people to each other.^ 

At these Vagabond dinners, the ordinary procedure was 
for two or three or four hundred members, male and female, 
to assemble to do honour to a famous guest. As soon as 
dinner was over, the chairman proposed the health of the 
King, and made the stereotyped joke about any lady, who 
wished, being peniiitted to smoke. He had this excuse at 
the Vagabonds, that many of the men smoked before they 
had received permission. Then he proposed the health of 
the guest, and the guest replied. All guests made the same 
jokes about the name " Vagabonds." I rather think that 
they must have been supplied to them by the toast-master 
at the Hotel Cecil, who always " prayed silence " with special 
gusto for " Mr. Hanthony 'Ope," because no other name 
gave him the same chances. 

When the guest had finished his speech, which was usually 
a very good one, because we chose them for their speaking, 

^ The members of this club, as far as I can remember, were : Conan Doyle, 
E. W. Hornung, Justin McCarthy, M.P., J. K. Jerome, S. R. Crockett, Anthony 
Hope, Gilbert Parker, Oswald Crawfurd, W. H. Wilkins, J. Bloimdelle-Burton, 
Frankfort Moore, Moncure D. Conway, Rudolf Lehmann, Edward Heron 
Allen, Barry Pain, Arthur Playfair, Arthur Diosy, Reginald Cleaver, G. A. 
Redford, Lewis Hind, Herbert Baily, Walter Blackman, G. W. Sheldon, 
Edward Elkins, Edgar Fawcett, Louis F. Austin, Bernard Partridge, John 
Charlton, Sir James Linton, Mortimer Menpes, Basil Gotto, Emerson Bain- 
bridge, M.P., Sir J. Henniker-Heaton, M.P., Penderel Brodhurst, C. N. William- 
son, Arthur A' Beckett, H. B. Vogel, Horace Cox, Grant Richards, Joe Hatton, 
Percy White, Clarence Rook, Henry Arthur Jones, Adrian Ross, Herbert 
Running, Judge Biron, Grimwood Mears, Rudolph Birnbaum, Ben Webster, 
Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Flora Annie Steel, John Oliver Hobbes, Florence 
Marryat, " Iota," Mrs. Campbell Praed, Annie Swan, Arabella Kenealy, 
George Paston, Norma Lorimer, "Rita," Mrs. Stepney Rawson, Violet 
Hunt, May Whitty, Rosalie Neish, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Mis. C. E. Humphry, 
and Mrs. Oscar Beringer. To these I must add one of the two famous Greenes 
who were singers; I cannot find the initial. It will be observed that there 
was hardly a person in the club whose name was not well known. 



THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS 181 

unless they were very eminent, we retired into the adjoining 
hall for an entertainment of singing, story-telling and con- 
juring, which I always thought spoilt the evening, much as 
I appreciated the performances of men like Churcher and 
Harrison Hill and Bertram, or Willie Nichol, or Reggie 
Groome, for when you had a number of eminent people 
collected together, far the best form of entertainment was 
to introduce them to each other. I remember the positive 
pain I felt at Lady Palmer's, when, a few minutes after she 
had introduced me to George Meredith for the first time, 
Johannes Wolff, the violinist, played a thing of Beethoven's 
which was as long as a sermon. I wanted to hear George 
Meredith so much more than him, having regarded him as 
one of the greatest masters of literature all my life, and wishing 
to surrender to the extraordinary charm of his way of speaking. 
I sympathise with a famous tenor, who told me that the first 
time he heard Handel's Messiah, when they came to the 
Hallelujah Chorus, he said, " Let's get ' oot,' there's going 
to be a row." 

Personally, I used to try and induce the most interesting 
people present, except the guest of the evening, to stay 
outside, and have whiskies and sodas. They generally 
hadn't the good taste to prefer singing to whiskies and 
sodas ; I hadn't, either, though I don't drink whisky. 

But the Hotel Cecil, where we held the Vagabond dinners, 
was not as bad as the Savage Club. In the old days there, 
if you did not wish to spend your evening glued to one chair, 
listening to singing, you had to stand in a tiny bar, the size 
of a scullery, and hear the same jokes from the same steady 
drinkers, just as you would have heard the same songs every 
Saturday evening if you had stayed in the room all the 
time. The Savage is a much more literary club now, and the 
accommodation is better arranged. I do not want to say 
anything against the old Savage. Those performances were 
good enough for anybody to listen to once, even King Edward 
VII, who, when he was Prince of Wales, dined there, and 
said that he had never enjoyed himself so much in his life. 
AVhat I objected to was the constant repetition of the same 
performance Saturday after Saturday, without having any 



182 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

place for members to sit and talk if they did not want to 
hear the music. But I have been to many Bohemian 
dinners in my time, and I have not met many men, except 
Walter Besant, who confessed that performances made him 
feel, as they make me, that he would have a nervous break- 
down if he listened to them for half-an-hour longer. I have 
noticed that most men, when they go to a club of this kind, 
where there are a number of really eminent people in the 
room, have no objection to listening to one vapid song after 
another, instead of being introduced to, we will say, Lord 
Kelvin, or Tennyson, or Sir Henry Irving, and this though 
they could have an equally good performance any night of 
their lives by paying for a seat in the promenade of a music- 
hall. When will people understand that the two sorts of 
entertainments ought to be kept separate — that the great 
object of a literary dinner is for one to meet men who write, 
or the people whom all the newspapers are writing about? 
You can go to a concert by paying for it; you cannot meet 
these people by any other means except introduction, and 
the hour or two after you have done eating at a public dinner 
is all too short a period for the chance of introduction to the 
world's workers. 



CHAPTER XIV 

LITERARY CLUBS : THE SAVAGE CLUB 

I WAS for a number of years a member of the Savage Club, 
and I was an honorary member there for a long time at an 
earlier period, when I first came home from Australia and 
the waiting list was full. 

I sometimes hinted to the then secretary that I had out- 
lived my month of honorary membership several times over. 
His answer was invariably the same : " Rules are intended 
to be enforced against disagreeable people." I remained 
an honorary member till I went away to America in 1888. 
Some years afterwards, when I returned from America, I 
became an ordinary member. 

At first I loved the Savage. There were not many author- 
members, it was true, who ever put in an appearance, except 
Christie Murray and Patchett Martin — Barrie was a member, 
but he was never there. The Club did not run to authors. 
What celebrities there were were chiefly actors and artists. 
But it was a club that consisted more of the admirers of the 
arts than their professors, men who packed the dinner-table 
every Saturday night, and made an enthusiastic audience 
for the actors and musicians and reciters, who did " turns " 
to amuse the company and get their names known to the 
public, if they were not already popular favourites, like 
W. H. Denny, Fred Kay, Odell, Willie Nichol and Reggie 
Groome. 

I have known the Savage Club long enough to remember 
Brandon Thomas and Seymour Hicks being regarded as 
brilliant amateurs, who never would be anything more. 
But both were very favourite performers at giving sketches 
accompanied by the piano. Penley was often there, but 
never would perform. One of the favourite jeunes 'premiers 

183 



184 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

of musical comedy — I forget which — used to sing " I'll sing 
thee Songs of Araby " every Saturday night. 

Before I went to America, while I knew hardly any one 
in Bohemia, and it was all new to me, I loved those Saturday 
nights. We had a bad half-crown dinner, in which I generally 
sat between quite uninteresting people — well-off furniture 
dealers and that kind of thing, who were most of them, 
however, keen and intelligent patrons of music and the 
drama, and belonged to the Savage for that reason. Most 
of them, too, were old members, with a large number of 
friends at whom they fired good-humoured banter across the 
tables. I found them willing to take one into their good- 
fellowship in the readiest manner, and occasionally one was 
rewarded by finding oneself near an affable celebrity. 

But the conversation was seldom in the least bit in- 
tellectual. Books were treated as non-existent in the Savage 
of that day. There were hardly any, even in the library, 
except poems given by the poets themselves. I was always 
heartily glad when the dinner was over, and the fusillade 
of ordering drinks was over, and the performance began. 

The club-house was situated then, as now, in Adelphi 
Terrace, a fine row of Georgian houses standing on a sort of 
marine parade above the bank of the Thames. If you looked 
over the railings on the opposite side of the road, you would 
expect to find a beach like Brighton's. I have never yet 
looked over these railings, so I don't know what there is 
below, but there must be vaults, which are used for some- 
thing, under the road, in such a valuable locality. 

The room where we held the dinners and these brilliant 
club concerts was only separated by a wall from David 
Garrick's dining-room. He made the mistake of living in 
the wrong house. 

The theory why we dined at 6.30, was that popular actors 
and singers could dine with us, and give us a turn before 
they went to their theatre. In practice, they very seldom 
came, unless they were having a holiday, voluntary or 
otherwise. But there were always enough of them " resting " 
to give us a brilliant evening. 

For some little time after dinner the Club did not settle 



THE SAVAGE CLUB 185 

down sufficiently to make its favourite performers willing 
to give their turns. It made too much noise over diluting 
whisky with soda, and manoeuvring to get the waiter's 
attention. This gave the new aspirant his chance. If he 
was timid and low- voiced, he did not always get the attention 
of the room, but it was not difficult to get the chairman to 
call on him. I know by experience how difficult it was to 
get any old " hand " to sing first. I called upon the bores 
first, when I was in the chair. There were several of them, 
whom the Club had grown into the habit of tolerating every 
Saturday night, so they had earned a right to be called on. 
They all said that they had colds, and afterwards, when the 
performance was at its height, sent round notes that they 
felt better, and would try to give a turn if I called upon them 
now. But I ignored the notes so long as I had any one else 
to call on. They were mostly reciters; almost any kind of 
song will go in a club which takes up a chorus. 

Some of the humorous reciters were very good. The club 
was never tired of hearing Robert Ganthony give a scene in 
a Metropolitan Police Magistrate's Court; or that youthful 
octogenarian, Fitzgerald, the artist, mimicking a rehearsal 
at Astley's in the old days ; or Odell, the idol of the Savage, 
going through his wonderful repertoire. Early in the even- 
ing, Walter Hedgcock, the Crystal Palace organist, would 
give us the song he never could publish, because he was 
blocked by an earlier setting — Kipling's " Mandalay." It 
was delightful music, and was eventually published as the 
" Mousmee," with words which I wrote for him in the metre 
of " Mandalay." Hedgcock did not mind coming on early, 
because he could always pick up the audience with the first 
bars of " Mandalay." 

Townley, who was Registrar of Births and Deaths at 
St. Pancras, I think — except on Saturday nights and Sundays 
— was our funniest singer ; he was a natural comedian. The 
Club always insisted on its favourites singing the same songs. 
He had to sing a song called " Hoop-la," or something of the 
kind. Willie Nichol had to sing " Loch Lomond " ; Cheese- 
wright had to sing " The Three Jolly Sailor-Boys " ; Denny, 
who was afterwards our honorary secretary, did generally 



186 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

give us something recent from the music-halls. But the old 
" hands " eyed him half resentfully while he did it. 

I soon came to regard Odell as an oasis, because, though 
the Club made him sing and recite the same things Saturday 
after Saturday, he had a blessed gift of gag. In the midst of 
his ballad about the Fleet, the one Warham St. Leger wrote 
for Punch, he stopped one night to tell us how he lost his 
last engagement. It was in a piece based on the wreck of the 
Princess Alice, the Thames steamer in which so many lives 
were lost. Odell played the part of captain of the steamer, 
and all went well till one night, as he expressed it, just at 
the fatal moment, when the people in the stalls were taking 
off their coats because they were so perspiring with excite- 
ment, he could stand the tension no longer, so he took out his 
watch and said, " It's just five o'clock. I wish I had gone 
back by the penny 'bus." The audience rose in their places, 
and stoned him with whatever came handy, and he pretended 
that after that he never could get an engagement. 

As I don't drink after dinner, and don't smoke at all, 
I began to find these concerts very tiring as soon as I knew 
all the performances by heart. But there was no other 
place of meeting except the bar. We badly needed a smoking- 
room, adjoining the dining-room and the bar, where those 
who had brought interesting people with them could introduce 
them to interesting Savages, without losing touch with the 
evening, as they did if they went up to that melancholy 
library, v/hich has probably been given over to some legitimate 
purpose, like Bridge, long ago. 

I frequently agitated for this smoking-room, and I believe 
that they got it eventually. The bar did too good a business ; 
you did not see people getting intoxicated; its habitues 
carried their liquor too well. But I have seen one man 
drink as many as thirty-three whiskys-and-sodas in a single 
evening, and I saw him the other day — twenty years after- 
wards — looking as fit as possible. 

Gradually I came to the conclusion that as there were 
so many other interesting things happening on Saturdays, 
it was not wise to give my Saturday evenings up to the 
Savage, and there was " nothing else to " the club in those 



THE SAVAGE CLUB 187 

days. It had not then become the favourite lunching-place 
of the great editors, an important venue for authors. 

So I retired from the Savage, as I retired from the Devon- 
shire a few years afterwards. When one of the committee 
of the Devonshire asked me why I retired from it, I said 
that I only used it for funerals, and that I was retiring 
because they had made that an extra. This was a fact. 
The windows of the Devonshire Club are one of the best 
places for seeing a royal funeral — or, of course, any other 
royal procession. The committee discovered this, and put 
on a charge of ten pounds a seat, to pay for the decorations 
of the Club. So many people wanted these seats that they 
had to be balloted for. The action of the committee was 
justified. But, as I had not used the Club since the funeral 
of Queen Victoria, when I found that I could not see the 
funeral of King Edward from its windows without balloting 
for the privilege of paying ten pounds for it, I sent in my 
resignation, and paid a guinea for a seat from which I could 
see the funeral for the whole length of Oxford and Cambridge 
Terrace. I went with Norma Lorimer and Markino, who 
painted a wonderful picture of it. The people on whose 
roof we hired the seats from the contractor, asked us to 
lunch, and became quite intimate friends. They proved 
to be Mr. Sanderson Stuart and his daughter — the youthful 
genius of sculpture. 

We used to get most notable guests at the Savage — was 
not the list headed by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. I 
was in the chair the night that Nansen was the guest of the 
evening. It was on the eve of his departure for the North 
Pole, and I hammered the table and asked the Club if they 
would allow me to invite our guest to write his name on the 
wall behind his seat, to remain there till he came back again. 
They assented with rapturous applause, and the name is 
there still, glazed over. I have told in another chapter what 
he said to the " Savage " who wished to accompany him to 
the Arctic Circle. 

The Savage Club is, undoubtedly, one of the institutions 
of London, and every literary visitor to these shores should 
see one of its Saturday nights. 



CHAPTER XV 

MY CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 

I MUST allude briefly to my long connection with journalism. 

When I settled in London in 1891, I had already done a 
good deal of journalism in New York and San Francisco. In 
the latter my writing had chiefly lain in travel-articles on 
Japan, to which San Francisco, as the Pacific Capital of the 
United States, naturally looks. In New York I had written 
on travel — much of my Japs at Home appeared in travel- 
articles for the McClure Syndicate. But I also wrote a 
number of literary and personal articles for the New York 
Independent, the Sun, the World, and so on, such as my 
Reminiscences of Cardinal Newman told in the first person. 
In doing this I found that what America demanded was the 
personal reminiscence. 

When I came to England, I naturally sought work on the 
same lines, and had no difficulty in finding editors who saw 
the opening for this comparatively fresh line in British 
journalism. 

I turned first to Fisher, of the Literary World, whom I 
had met at the Idler teas, and who had invited me to do some 
reviewing for him. He had Table-Talk Notes as a feature, 
and here my first journalism appeared. 

When I was helping Jerome to formulate To-day in 1893, 
I suggested to him that we should have a book of the week, 
in which we told as much about the author as we knew, and 
that biographical gossip about authors and artists and actors 
should be one of our chief features. He was completely in 
favour of it, and I wrote a good deal for him, especially about 
authors. 

About the same time, Lewis Hind became editor of the 
now defunct Pall Mall Budget, and I carried out the same 



CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 189 

idea for him in a regular causerie, to which we gave the name 
of the Diner-Out, and which I signed " St. Barbe " — the 
family name of my maternal grandmother. 

Between these three papers I was pretty fully occupied. 
But my mind was turning towards a more congenial form 
of journalism — the travel-article. Percy Cox, a son of 
the Horace Cox whose name appeared on the Queen as its 
publisher for so many years, was anxious to develop its 
travel side, and while the late Sievers Drewett was organising 
the wonderful travel department, which now has its annual 
Queen Book of Travel, he employed me to write a series of 
articles on my travels in Greece and Turkey, and a regular 
travel-serial on the trans-continental journey across Canada, 
which I amplified and brought out as On the Cars and Off. 

While I was doing these, Clement Shorter, who had been 
a sort of literary editor to the Queen — all the important 
books being sent to him, and he writing a sort of causerie 
about them — became too busy with his offspring, the Sketch, 
to do any more work for the Queen, and I was offered his 
place. My suggestion that we should have a signed " book 
of the week " for the most important book — unsigned minor 
reviews to be worked in anywhere about the paper — and 
that I should do my Diner-Out column for the Queen, instead 
of the Pall Mall Budget, was accepted, and I began my 
literary connection with the Queen, which lasted for so many 
years. I kept the Diner-Out for biographical gossip about 
authors chiefly, and for announcements of forthcoming 
books, which could be made interesting by personal gossip. 
Actual reviewing I kept as far as possible out of that column. 
In those days, though the Queen was and always had been the 
chief ladies' paper, it had not nearly so many departments 
of feminine interest as it has now, so there was plenty of 
space for book-reviewing, which became a very important 
feature of the paper. I was only responsible for the Book 
of the Week and the Diner-Out, though I did perhaps a 
page of unsigned minor reviews, which were never attributed 
to me. 

I had one faithful reader in her late Majesty, Queen 
Victoria. I learned this quite incidentally. I had taken 



190 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

a manoir in Brittany for the summer, and at the house of 
Mrs. Burrowes, a niece of the late Lord Perth, met the lady 
who filled the post of reader to Her Majesty ; Queen Victoria 
prefered having books and newspapers read aloud to her. 
This lady informed me that Her Majesty had my Diner -Out 
column in the Queen read to her every week, and was most 
amused by it. 

As the woman's side of the paper developed, the space for 
reviewing became more and more restricted, and the Diner- 
Out became simply a column of small reviews, without any 
of its own features, and finally, I think, the name itself very 
often dropped out. 

While I was doing the reviewing for the Queen, we were 
travelling a great deal in France, Italy, Sicily and Egypt. 
The books which I published on these countries were, as 
far as the travel portion of them was concerned, largely 
drawn from these articles in the Queen — beginning with 
Brittany for Britons. Some of them, such as the Normandy 
articles, I never did re-publish, and I contributed to the 
Queen enough articles on Italy to form another volume, 
besides those which have already appeared in my books on 
Italy and Sicily. 

I still do some reviewing for the Queen, but I do little other 
journalism now, except when I am approached by some 
newspaper to do an article on a subject upon which I have 
special knowledge. 

The fact is, that in recent years I have employed my 
journalistic faculties on the preparation of books like Who's 
Who, Sladen's London and Its Leaders and The Green Book 
of London Society, which need much the same kind of gifts 
as personal journalism does. 

The Green Book was a sort of one-line Who's Who, which 
only mentioned the leading people in each walk of London 
life, except the bearing of a title. The selection of the chief 
personages and experts in each line — say, for instance, 
shooting or fishing or golf or writing books — was not made 
by any correspondence with the people themselves, but was 
entrusted to the chief expert in each line. Golf was by a 
runner-up for the Amateur Championship, fishing by the 




SIDNEY LOW 

Drawn by Yoshio Markino 



CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 191 

fishing editor of the Field, exploration by the secretary of 
the Royal Geographical Society, and so on. 

Who's Who itself must form the subject of a separate 
chapter. 

I have no older friend in journalism than Sidney Low. 
We went to Oxford, I think, on the same day — he was a 
Scholar of Balliol and I was a Scholar of Trinity — and we 
certainly knew each other very well there, and have been 
intimate friends ever since. His ability received early 
recognition. Before he had left Oxford ten years, he was 
editor-in-chief of a great London daily, and he has written 
books which have become standard works, like the Dictionary 
of English History, which has been through half-a-dozen 
editions. Since he gave up editing he has represented the 
leading papers on the most important special missions. He 
has been an alderman of the London County Council, and he 
has been one of the chief forces in literary society. If I 
were asked who had introduced me to the largest number of 
eminent persons, I should say Sidney Low — without hesita- 
tion. No man passes saner or more moderate judgments 
on the great questions of the hour. Indeed, I should say 
that Low stands in journalism for what a man who was at 
Oxford with both of us— George Cave, K.C., M.P. — stands 
in politics — for moderation in statement, combined with 
great firmness of principle and judgment. 

With Low's name I must couple that of the late Samuel 
Henry Jeyes, who was his colleague both on the St. James's 
Gazette and the Standard. He was a beloved friend of us 
both, but my intimacy with him began much earlier. He 
was my greatest friend at Trinity, Oxford, and one of the 
Oxford men of whom I saw most in after life. We were 
elected Scholars of Trinity on the same day; we had rooms 
on the same staircase; we went to all the same lectures till 
we passed mods., and I taught him to play billiards. It 
was the only game of manual skill which he ever did play. 
He lashed the adulation for sport which prevails at Oxford 
with the gibes of which he was such a master. When we 
had only been up at Oxford for a few days, A. J. Webbe, 
who was the special idol of Trinity because he was captain 



192 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

of the 'Varsity Eleven, asked all of us Trinity freshmen 
to meet some of the lions of the Oxford Eleven. All of us 
except Jeyes were vastly elated. We all, except Jeyes, 
talked our best cricket shop to make a good impression on 
the demigods. At last he could stand it no longer, and, 
waiting till there was a dead pause in the conversation, he 

said, " This b y cricket ! " I can remember the tableau 

still. 

His reputation as a wit came up with him from Uppingham. 
All Uppingham men could remember how, when he was 
caught cribbing with a Bible on his knee at a Greek Testa- 
ment lesson, and his class-master had said to him triumph- 
antly, " What have you there, Jeyes? " he said, " A book, 
sir, of which no man need be ashamed," and how when 
Thring, the greatest head master of his time, had asked him 
how he came to be ploughed in arithmetic for his Oxford 
and Cambridge certificate, he replied from Shakespeare, 
" I cannot reckon, it befits the spirit of a tapster " — a 
readiness which Thring would have been the first to appreciate. 

Among the best things I remember him saying at Oxford 
are his definition of the Turks in a great debate over the 
Bulgarian atrocities, as a people " whose morals are as loose 
as their trousers, and whose vices are as many as their 
wives." And it was he who said, " I don't want to go to 
Heaven, because Gore (now Bishop of Oxford) is the only 
Trinity man who will be there, and I'd rather be with the 
rest." 

Jeyes never spoke at the Union — he despised it — or he 
would have been as great a success as the miraculous 
Baumann or Freeman, now Rector of Burton-on-Trent. 
I never remember hearing Cave speaking at the Union, 
though perhaps he did. 

One of Jeyes' wittiest retorts was to " Bobby " Raper, 
at that time Dean of Trinity, who was " hauling " him 
for some meretricious disregard of College discipline. The 
glib excuse was not wanting, but Raper was stern. " No 
no, Mr. Jeyes, that won't do. You told me the exact 
opposite of that last term." " I know I did, Mr. Dean, 
but that was a lie." 



CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 193 

He owed the Dean one, for the first thing he did when he 
went up to Trinity had been to go and call on the Dean and 
tell him that he had conscientious scruples against going 
to chapel. 

" Morning chapel, you know, Mr. Jeyes," said the Dean, 
" is a matter of discipline and not of religion, but if you 
really have conscientious objections, I'll put on a roll-call for 
you at 7 a.m." — Chapel was at 8 a.m., so Jeyes swallowed 
his nausea. 

But Jeyes' wit was tireless. He was a fine scholar — he 
made his pupils write wonderful Latin prose when he became 
a don at University — I presume during the undergraduacy 
of Lord Hugh and Lord Robert Cecil. But he tore himself 
away to be a journalist, and became in time an assistant- 
editor of the St. James's Gazette, and later of the Standard. 

As a journalist he was distinguished by incorruptibility 
of no common sternness. Though he had always spoken as 
a Liberal at Oxford (very likely out of malice, because all his 
friends were Conservatives), he was one of the pillars of 
Conservative journalism. He knew all the chiefs of the 
Conservative party, and enjoyed great influence with them. 
He was so rugged and unbending. I never knew a harder 
editor to " work." He wrote a Spartan life of Chamberlain, 
for whom he had a great admiration, except in the matter 
of Tariff Reform. 

He married an old friend of ours, the beautiful Viva 
Sherman, an American nearly related to the Senator- Vice- 
President and the General. Both before and after his 
marriage he was a frequent visitor at our house, and we often 
met at Ranelagh and elsewhere. He enjoyed a discussion 
with Norma Lorimer. Her wit provoked his, and their 
conversations were most brilliant to listen to. 

At last poor Jeyes was struck down with cancer — aggra- 
vated, I believe, by cigar-smoking, in which he was a noted 
connoisseur. He bore it with magnificent fortitude, and 
for a long time kept it a secret. Even I did not know that 
he had been mortally ill till he was dead. But I was one of 
the three old Oxford friends who stood by his grave — his 
oldest friend, except H. B. Freeman, who read the service, 
o 



194 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Sidney Low was the other. Charles Boyd was there too, 
but he belonged to a much younger generation. 

If Jeyes had known that his life would be so short, he 
would perhaps have devoted more time to book-writing. 
It is a pity — except for his country and the Conservative 
party — that he gave up so much of his life to necessarily 
ephemeral journalism. I always heard that but for a flaw 
in a will he would have been owner of one of the greatest 
provincial journals in England. 

ijf Peace be to his ashes. He was a merry soul, and if the 
theosophists are right about our astral bodies meeting the 
spirits of the departed, there is no one with whom I should 
so much enjoy an astral conversation as Jeyes. He would 
be such a volatile spirit. I can imagine the naivete with 
which he would describe his experiences. 

The Rev. Herbert Bentley Freeman — ^the Rector of Burton- 
on-Trent — a cousin of the historian, and a descendant, I 
believe, of the mighty Bentley of Phalaris renown, came up 
to Trinity from Uppingham in the same term as Jeyes. 
Freeman and A. A. Baumann, who was afterwards Con- 
servative M.P. for Peckham, were the two most brilliant 
speakers at the Union in my day. The undergraduates 
said that both wrote their speeches beforehand, and learned 
them by heart and practised their delivery. 

Years afterwards I met Baumann when he had given up 
his safe seat at Peckham and unsuccessfully contested a seat 
in the North, I think at Manchester. 

" What made you give up Peckham? " I asked. " They 
would have gone on electing you there as long as you lived." 

" My dear chap, life isn't worth living when you are 
member for Peckham. I live in South Kensington, and 
while I was member for Peckham I used to find my hall 
full of constituents by the time I came down for breakfast, 
and by lunch-time you'd have thought that I was having 
an auction of my furniture." 

But of all the men who were at Oxford with me, no one 
has been so prominent, then and now taken together, in 
intellectual circles as W. L. Courtney. Courtney was then 
a rather young New College don, who had the distinction 



CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 195 

of being married to an extremely smart-looking wife. That 
would have been a distinction by itself in the Oxford of 
that day, for few were married in a way suitable to impress 
undergraduates. Added to that, he cut the most eminent 
figure in athletics of any don in Oxford. He was the 
treasurer of the University Boat Club, while the dons re- 
spected him as the ablest man in Oxford at philosophy. 
I was not there when he gave it all up to come to London 
and be literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and editor of 
the Fortnightly Review, but I can imagine the consternation 
which fell upon that ancient seat of learning when their 
bright particular star, the admiration alike of don and 
undergraduate, " chucked it," as they say, for journalism. 
Of course he did wisely, for in an incredibly short space of 
time he had as distinguished a position in London as he had 
had at Oxford. His influence on literature has been immense. 
He has stood for the combination of scholarliness and up- 
to-dateness. His own books range from essays on the verge 
of fiction to some of the most important works on philosophy 
published in his generation. Incidentally, the creator of 
Egeria is our best dramatic critic, and a writer of plays. 

Both the late and the present editors of the Field, William 
Senior and Theodore Andrea Cook, came to our Addison 
Mansions receptions. That delightful man, William Senior, 
the " Red Spinner " of fishing journalism, and his wife 
came very often to us. Theodore Andrea Cook is the ideal 
editor for a great sporting paper like the Field, for he had 
not only been editor of a great daily, but he had rowed in 
the Oxford boat, and been a Scholar of his College, and he 
had captained the all-England team in the international 
fencing matches at the Olympic games which were held 
at Athens. He has also written very sound books on an 
unusual variety of subjects (one of which, his book on 
The Spiral in Nature and Art, was most widely discussed) ; 
and is one of the most delightful writers we have of travel- 
books on France. Of course, everything which he has written 
upon sport is ex cathedra. 

Walter Jerrold, who lives a little higher up the river than 
I do, in an old house with a great garden, a very old friend, 



196 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

and a much older Vagabond than I, often came with his 
wife to us at Addison Mansions. Jerrold is a grandson of 
the famous wit, Douglas Jerrold. He was for more than 
a dozen years sub-editor of the Observer. But fortunately 
he found time for editing of another nature as well, which 
will help his own books to give him a permanent place in 
our literature. He is one of our best editors of nineteenth- 
century classics ; his biographical and bibliographical intro- 
ductions are the most useful of their kind — just what you 
would expect from the grandson of a man who was a star 
in the firmament of which he writes. 

Clement Shorter, who married the Irish poetess, and was 
editor of the Illustrated London News when we met at 
Rudolph Lehmann's in the " nineties," is another editor of 
books as well as papers. The Brontes are his special proteges. 
He is the acknowledged Bronte expert, and every one has 
read his new book on George Borrow. He has been great at 
founding — he not only founded the Sketch, the Sphere and 
the Toiler, but he was one of the founders of the Omar 
Khayyam Club, beloved of Radical litterateurs, though it 
deals not with English politics, but English Persies. Here 
you are always sure of good speaking — Mr. Balfour and 
Mr. Asquith, and all the important Cabinet Ministers and 
ex-Cabinet Ministers have spoken there on occasion. I have 
never heard Shorter speak himself, but I understand that 
he is a very good political speaker, and I can picture him 
telling a Lincolnshire audience how wrong it is to have an 
income not half as great as his own, for Shorter has been 
deservedly prosperous. He is a great journalist — one of 
the pioneers of modern journalism. He was a Civil Service 
clerk when in 1890 he became editor of the Illustrated London 
News, and only a couple of years had passed before he 
started the Sketch, the model of a new class of paper, for the 
same office, and continued to edit both papers till 1900. 
Then he thought that he would like to have a paper of his 
own, and raised a hundred thousand pounds to found the 
Sphere and the Tatler, with which he has been associated 
ever since, as editor of the former and director of both. 
They are rightly among the most popular illustrated papers 



CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 197 

of the day, for they have reduced the handhng of the personal 
element to a science, and Shorter always was a brilliant 
editor. His success has been largely due to his colossal 
energy and industry. He has taken a minute interest in 
every detail of the production of both papers. 

In the midst of all his journalistic labours, Shorter has 
found time to write some admirable books, and has made 
himself with two books a specialist on Napoleon in his period 
of exile at St. Helena. 

Herbert White, the present editor of the Standard, is one 
of the best informed of all the English newspaper editors 
about Continental politics, because he went through such 
an arduous schooling in Austria and Germany, and knows 
German as well as he knows English. He married the 
niece of an Austrian political leader, and after war-corre- 
spondenting in the Grseco-Turkish war of 1897, represented 
leading English, American and French newspapers at Vienna 
from 1897 to 1902, and Berlin from 1903 to 1911. Besides this 
he has taken twenty special journalistic missions in every 
country of the Continent except France and Russia. 

I should be accused of sycophancy if I said all I should 
like to say of Robertson Nicoll, of whom I saw a good deal 
before we were both such busy men. But there are some 
things about Nicoll to which nobody can be blind, besides 
the position of respect which he enjoys in the literary com- 
munity. He makes a bona fide attempt to educate his party 
in politics, and his public in a spirit of commonsense and 
toleration instead of appealing to their prejudices, and no 
man has done more in the way of securing the publication 
of the books of unknown authors of merit, who have justified 
his expectations and given the world great books. Nicoll 
has been the sincere and enthusiastic friend of merit. I can 
say this without prejudice, because his firm have published 
nothing of mine. 

Similarity of name, and their common friendship with the 
A. S. Boyds, makes me mention here James Nicol Dunn, 
whose editorship of the Morning Post was marked by such 
an advance in the political weight of that paper. Dunn was 
managing editor of the National Observer in its prime. For 



198 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

solid efficiency as a journalist, he had no superior in the 
country. It would have been a bad day for England when 
he left it to edit the Johannesburg Star, if it had not been so 
important that the chief organ of the Transvaal should be in 
such brave, moderate and judicious hands, at such a critical 
period in the history of South Africa. 

T. P. O'Connor is a very old friend of mine. I met him 
first when we were both in America in 1888-1889, and we have 
been on terms of Christian names ever since. Though we 
differ strongly in politics, it has never affected our friendship, 
for T. P. is very fair to his enemies, except when he happens 
to have a special hatred for them. He has founded four 
papers — the Star, the Sun, T. P.'s Weekly and M. A. P. — 
but I am not sure as to how far he is still interested in any 
of them. 

T. P. is to me a fascinating personality. He is so generous 
and genial. The swift recognition, the ready smile, the 
warm affectionate manner, have endeared him to hosts of 
friends, and every one recognises that he has a golden pen 
which invests everything he touches with interest, and an 
acute intelligence — acute enough to sift even the Humbert 
mystery and present a clear analysis of it, as witness his 
Phantom Millions. 

He is a golfer too, and once upon a time used to play with 
W. G. Grace, who, it seems, in spite of his being the best 
cricketer that ever lived, always hits his shot along the ground 
except from the tee, though he drives and puts pretty well. 
I got this egregious piece of journalism from him when we 
were sitting next to each other at the dinner given by 
M. Escoffier, at that time, and probably still, cook at the 
Carlton Hotel, who gave a gourmet's feast on the occasion 
of the publication of his book on cookery, published by 
Heinemann. Heinemann invited me. The chief thing I 
remember about the feast is that the wine Escoffier selected 
was Pommery Naturel, and that the tour de force was lamb 
stuffed with sage and onions to replace the usual mint 
sauce. 

John Malcolm Bulloch, the editor of the Graphic, who 
gave me such immense assistance when I was writing Adam 



CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 199 

Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia, 
is an author whose father and grandfather were authors 
before him. His speciaHties are the ancient University of 
Aberdeen, of which he is an MA., and the great house of 
Gordon. He edited the House of Gordon for the New Spalding 
Club, and has written many pamphlets on Gordon genealogy 
besides his book on The Gay Gordons. 

I happen to enjoy the friendship of the editors of both 
the Bookseller and the Publishers' Circular. George H. 
Whitaker, who is a doctor by profession, saw a good deal 
of the world as a ship's doctor when he was a young man. 
Now the world sees a good deal of him as head of the firm 
which publishes Whitaker' s Almanack, as well as editor of 
the Bookseller — famed, as a trade-organ ought to be, for 
the justice of its reviews. 

R. B. Marston, who edits the Publishers' Circular, edits 
the Fishing Gazette also. He founded the Fly Fishers' Club. 
The Marstons are famous fishermen — his father, Edward 
Marston, who has just died at a Nestor's age, had been one of 
Izaak Walton's chief followers both with pen and rod. R. B. 
is, besides writing books on fishing and photography, one of 
the chief writers on our food supplies in war, an energetic 
and patriotic public man. 

My oldest acquaintance in journalism, except Sidney 
Low, is Penderel Brodhurst, the editor of the Guardian. 
We used to meet at Henley's in the days before I went to 
America, which was in 1888. He was in those days the walk- 
ing encyclopaedia of the St. James's Gazette, and afterwards 
edited the long-defunct St. James's Budget. He was, as he 
is, a man wrapped up in his work : he could, if he had chosen, 
have been a personage in literary society on his very historical 
name, for he is a descendant of the Penderel who saved King 
Charles II in the oak at Boscobel, and enjoys a pension 
therefor, probably one of the oldest pensions still running 
in England, and he is, though he does not use his title, an 
Italian marquis (Penderel de Boscobel, created 1782). 

Lindsay Bashford, being literary editor of the Daily Mail, 
has only had time to write one book — Everybody's Boy — 
but that was a very good one. But he has a sufficient 



200 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

literary record apart from that, for he was lecturer on English 
literature at a French university. 

J. A. Spender, the editor of the Westminster, is another 
author-editor. I have known him for many years. He 
comes of a brilliant family, for he is a son of Mrs. J. K. 
Spender, and brother of Harold Spender. He was an 
Exhibitioner of Balliol, and Harold was an Exhibitioner 
of University College, Oxford. Both of them are authors 
of half-a-dozen books, and both of them are wonderfully 
clever and well-informed men, real powers in journalism. 

Sir Owen Seaman, of Punch, who was Captain of Shrews- 
bury School, and took a First in the Classical Tripos, and 
the Person Prize at Cambridge, can best be described as the 
modern Calverley, for no one since Calverley has written such 
brilliant satirical lyrics. He was the " O. S." of the National 
Observer, and who does not remember " The Battle of the 
Bays," " In Cap and Bells " and " Borrowed Plumes " ? 

H. W. Massingham, of the Nation, the most conspicuous 
political journalist on the Liberal side, one of the few Liberals 
who dare to try and lead their party against its will, has only 
written a couple of books, both rather technical. The London 
Daily Press and Labour and Protection. 

Sidney Paternoster, the assistant-editor of Truth, is well 
known as a novelist, as is Adcock, of the Bookman, but, taken 
as a whole, editors of great newspapers are not writers of 
books. 

Ernest Parke, director of the Daily News and Leader and 
the Star, was at one time a regular attendant at the Vagabond 
banquets, as was his sub., Hugh Maclaughlan. Parke 
and I saw the Coronation together from a seat in the tri- 
forium of Westminster Abbey right over the little square 
of Oriental carpet on which His Majesty King George V 
was crowned, so we had a splendid view of the Archbishop 
of Canterbury and the Garter King-at-Arms, addressing 
the North, South, East and West as witnesses, and of the 
Dukes of Beaufort and Somerset, towering above Lord 
Kitchener as he walked between them, an object lesson 
which I suppose was not unintended. Parke is a great 
journalist, and made the Star a force in literature. Leonard 



CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 201 

Rees, of the Sunday Times, who shines as a hterary critic 
as well as a musical critic, with whom I have had much 
correspondence, I have never met personally. But Vivian 
Carter, who was on the staff of the Institution of Civil 
Engineers till only a dozen years ago, and has in the last 
five years edited the Bystander with such conspicuous success, 
is a mutual friend of the C. N. Williamsons and myself. 
We meet there. 

J. S. Wood, the founder and managing director of the 
Gentlewoman, and one of the real founders of the Primrose 
League, was often from the beginning at our at-homes, 
with his pretty Italian wife, and his daughters as they grew 
up. We used to meet them in the season at Ranelagh, too. 
Wood has been much more than a founder and editor of 
newspapers, for he has been connected with the management 
of several of our most important charities, and has himself 
been instrumental in raising a quarter of a million for them. 

All the Kenealys (Arabella and Annesley, both authors, 
Edward and Noel, both editors) were frequent visitors at 
our flat, except Alexander Kenealy, the editor of the Daily 
Mirror, who was in America for twenty years before he became 
news editor of the Daily Express, and, later, editor of the 
Mirror. More than any of the others, Alexander Kenealy 
inherits the splendid abilities of his father, the famous 
Dr. Kenealy, Q.C., M.P., one of the greatest lawyers of his 
time, who took up the case of the Tichborne claimant 
when others had abandoned it as hopeless, and almost 
pulled him through. 

Another of our editor friends was Edwin Oliver, at that 
time editor of Atalanta and subsequently of the Idler, and, 
since 1910, of the widely influential Outlook. 

I cannot conclude my chapter on journalism without 
reference to Sir Hugh Gilzean-Reid, whose pet plaything 
was the Institute of Journalists. He used often to come to 
our house with his charming daughters. Sir Hugh, who 
had made a considerable fortune out of journalism, large 
enough to let him live in Dollis Hill, the house near Willesden 
which Lord Aberdeen lent to Mr. Gladstone, never forgot 
the working journalist, and it was he who engineered the 



202 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

agitation which defeated the intention of two of the great 
London dailies to issue Sunday editions hke the American 
Sunday World and Sunday Sun. As Herbert Cornish was 
the creator, he was chief founder and first President of the 
Institute of JournaHsts also. He used to give large garden- 
parties at Dollis Hill, chiefly to people who appreciated its 
having been consecrated by the residence of Mr. Gladstone, 
though there were others, like ourselves, who went because 
we liked his family so much. He was a philanthropic man, 
and did an immense amount of good. 

The first paid journalism I ever did was writing articles 
on public school life for the Educatio7ial Reporter when I 
was a boy at Cheltenham. About the same time I wrote a 
story for Bow Bells called " Douglas Thirlstaine's Wooing," 
which was not paid for, and soon after that I supplied unpaid 
notes about Cheltenham College to a Cheltenham paper, 
which had never been able to get them, as a favour to the 
late Frederick Stroud, who had got me out of the libel action 
brought by the editors of the Shotover Papers. I wish I 
could find that libel now. It was a small pamphlet of a few 
pages, published under the title of Overshot by a printer in 
Turl Street, Oxford. I saw about the printing of it when 
I was up in Oxford competing for a scholarship at Trinity 
or Balliol, lodging with Ray, who was afterwards to be my 
scout, in one of the sixteenth-century cottages which now 
form part of Trinity. 

In Australia the only money I made in journalism was 
five pounds which I received from the Queenslander for the 
serial rights of a novel which I have never re-published, 
and a guinea which I received from the Illustrated Australian 
News as a prize for the best poem on Federation. 

When I got back to England, the first paid journalism 
I did was for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 
edited by A. E. T. Watson, who now edits the Badminton 
Magazine, and who projected and edits the Badminton Library, 
and is a member of the National Hunt Committee — one 
of the chief sportsmen in journalism. The subjects on 
which I wrote were Australian cricket and Australian poetry, 
like Gordon's, and on both subjects I was the chief authority 



CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 203 

until I went to America, odd as it may seem now. I also 
wrote on Gordon for the Graphic, and had a long historical 
article in the Cornhill, and a serial novel — Trincolox — in 
Temple Bar. 

When I went to America, I wrote a good deal for papers 
and magazines, but almost entirely in verse, except a series 
of articles which I had to telegraph from Montreal about 
the Carnival to a great American daily. I remember think- 
ing that the telegraphing was such a useless expense for such 
unimportant stuff. 

In Japan I wrote a good deal for the Japan Gazette, but 
my contributions were gratis, because there the editor, 
Nuttall, now one of the editors of the Daily Telegraph, was 
expected to write the whole paper himself. I used to help 
him, and he exerted himself to get various permissions for 
me. He was a very capable man, who kept his paper 
interesting though he had to make his bricks without straw. 

However, when I got back to America from Japan I 
commenced journalism in real earnest. I wrote a good many 
articles at four pounds a column for the San Francisco 
Chronicle, and, as I have said, wrote for many papers in 
New York, and when I returned to England I introduced 
the American biographical journalism to many papers, and 
at one time was fully occupied with it, until I diverted the 
capabilities I used for it to the founding of Who's Who. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS : PART I 

My active literary career dates from my return from 
America. Hitherto, with the exception of the Handbook 
to Japan and the potboiler for the North German Lloyd, and 
a shilling shocker, published anonymously, and the two 
series of articles on Japan executed for the San Francisco 
Chronicle and McClure's Syndicate respectively, my literary 
aspirations had all been poetical. I had published volumes 
of my own verse entitled : Frithjof and Ingebjorg, Australian 
Lyrics, A Poetry of Exiles, A Summer Christmas, In Cornwall 
and Across the Sea, Edward the Black Prince, The Spanish 
Armada, Lester the Loyalist, and four anthologies, Australian 
Ballads and Rhymes, A Century of Australian Song, Aus- 
tralian Poets and Younger American Poets, one of which, 
Australian Ballads, had a very large sale, though I only had 
ten pounds for doing it. 

But in America I had been under the necessity of making 
money, because my private income was unequal to the 
increased expense of living in America. The articles for 
McClure and the San Francisco Chronicle were the outcome 
of this necessity, and having found that I could add materially 
to my income by writing about travel when in America, I 
conceived the idea of making my articles on Japan, a country 
then but little known in England, into a book. I went to 
Mr. A. P. Watt, then not many years established, and he 
procured me a commission from Hutchinson & Co. — the 
first of a series of commissions which has gone on from that 
day to this. That book was The Japs at Home, the most 
successful, in point of sales, of all my books, for not less 
than a hundred and fifty thousand copies of it have been 
sold by various publishers. Hutchinson & Co. brought out 
editions of it at eighteen shillings (two), six shillings, and 

204 




o ~- 
o ^ 
02 t: 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 205 

three-and-six, and then, having got through four editions of 
it, and beheving the sale at an end, gave the book up to me. 
Another pubUsher sold fifteen thousand copies of it at half- 
a-crown, and then exchanged the book rights with me for 
the serial rights, and since then there has been a shilling 
edition, an enormous sixpenny edition, and a threepenny- 
halfpenny edition ; the shilling and the threepenny-halfpenny 
editions are selling still. 

Following The Japs at Home came On the Cars and Off, 
the success of which was ruined by having illustrations which 
took six weeks to produce. It was a guinea book, and a 
first edition of a thousand copies was sold directly. But the 
second edition was not ready till nearly two months later, 
and by that time the interest in the book was dead. 

My next book of travel was Brittany for Britons, published 
as one of the familiar little half-crown guides of A. and C. 
Black, of which a great number of copies were sold. I cannot 
say how many, because I parted with the copyright. 

After this my energies were diverted from travel-books 
for a while, because I wanted to try my hand at novel writing. 
The result was A Japanese Marriage, which, after The Japs 
at Home, has been my most successful book in sales. About 
ten thousand copies of it were sold in octavo form, and as a 
sixpenny various publishers have sold a hundred and twenty 
thousand. 

For two years after our return from America we confined 
ourselves to short excursions to the milder parts of England 
— Hampshire, chiefly round Norman Christchurch ; Devon- 
shire, in the nook of Dartmoor round Drewsteignton, and on 
the gloriously wild coast round Salcombe; and the woods of 
the Isle of Wight. During this period I finished The Japs 
at Home, and wrote On the Cars and Off, which was not 
published till 1895, about our double journey across America 
from Halifax to Vancouver's Island. 

Then a new interest came into my life — we were persuaded 
in 1895 to spend a summer and autumn at St. Andrews, and 
there I acquired the inevitable taste for golf, which has kept 
me interested and amused and healthful and unaging. Cer- 
tainly this was one of the most fortunate inspirations we ever 
had for a holiday, since, after being devoted to games at school 



206 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

and College and in Australia, I had left off football and cricket 
and tennis, and even shooting, as soon as I settled in London. 

Poor old Tom Morris never had a worse pupil, for I play 
everything wrong, and owe the prizes and medals I have 
won at golf to the straightness of eye which helped me to 
win every shooting challenge cup at Cheltenham and every 
shooting challenge cup at Oxford. At St. Andrews I not 
only had a glorious spell of golf, but fell deeply in love with 
romantic and historical Fifeshire. There are few places 
which combine so many attractions as St. Andrews. It is 
the capital of golf ; its cliffs capped with old houses, and its 
ancient port, are beautiful enough for Sicily, and its great 
ruined castle and its immemorial cathedral make it archi- 
tecturally the most interesting place in Scotland after Edin- 
burgh and Stirling. Nor does it yield to many in historical 
interest. I should live there if it had a climate like Naples. 

It gave us such a hunger for old architecture and romantic 
scenery that in the following summer we went to the old 
Breton towns on the Gulf of St. Malo. We stayed at St. 
Servan in a seventeenth-century manoir called La Gentillerie, 
which we had from the chaplain, my school-friend, William 
Vassall, who stayed with us as our guest in his own house. 

From a point close by we could look across the harbour 
to St. Malo, with its mediaeval walls and crane's-bill steeple, 
and on the other side were no further from Dinan. From 
St. Servan we went on for a month in Normandy, which I 
much prefer to Brittany. Towns like Rouen and Caen, 
Coutances and Bayeux, Evreux, Lisieux and Falaise, are 
citadels of medisevalism. 

During this holiday I wrote my third travel-book, published 
in England, Brittany for Britons, issued a year later, and put 
the final touches on my first acknowledged novel, A Japanese 
Marriage. 

It was my two books on Japan, The Japs at Home and 
A Japanese Marriage, which helped me to gain a literary 
position; both went into several editions in their first year. 
Between them they have sold more than a quarter of a 
million copies. 

But I was on the verge of a book-success of another kind, 
which could hardly be called a literary success, though more 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 207 

people connect my name with this than with any of my 
books. Messrs. A. & C. Black, who had published A 
Japanese Marriage and Brittany for Britons, approached me 
to know if I would expand Who's Who, of which they had 
just purchased the copyright. 

They showed it to me, and asked me if I could turn it 
into a book of reference — a sort of cross between the old 
Who's Who and Men of the Time was the idea which shaped 
itself from our discussion. 

The two visits which we paid to Salcombe in Devon, the 
second of them with Reginald Cleaver, have not yet furnished 
me with any subject for writing. 

The year 1896, in which I compiled the new Who's Who, 
was also a notable year for me from the travel point of view. 
At last I faced the exertion of taking my family to Sicily, 
which had been my ambition for exactly ten years. It was 
not such a stereotyped journey as it is now. I began to 
make inquiries about it when we reached Naples, and could 
not find an Englishman in the place — even the Consul- 
General — who had ever been to Sicily. But the Consul- 
General made inquiries, and said that he did not think 
travelling in Sicily was very difficult or dangerous. He, 
however, asked me if I had a revolver, and recommended 
me not to take out a licence for it at the Consulate, because 
in Sicily a licence is not available for the whole island, but 
only for one province, and there are seven provinces. He 
also told me that he was quite sure that no Sicilian ever 
took out a licence, though they all carried firearms. As for 
malaria, he did not know; he never troubled about it; he 
always spent the summer in or near Naples, and never felt 
any the worse for it. This Consul was my great friend, 
Eustace Neville-Rolfe, who had lately sold his ancestral 
estate of Heacham in Norfolk. Nelson students will remem- 
ber allusions in the great Admiral's letters to his uncle Rolfe 
at Heacham. But my friend hated the climate of Norfolk, 
and hated its politics, and settled at Naples, where a good 
many years afterwards they made him Consul-General for 
the unconstitutional reason that he knew more about Naples 
than any living Englishman. He had the unique distinction 
of joining the Consular Service as a Consul-General. 



208 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

When we got to Sicily we found it perfectly easy and safe. 
The Whitakers of Palermo, to whom he gave us an intro- 
duction, at once became our friends, and told us all we ought 
to see and all we ought to do in the island. On that trip 
we paid fairly exhaustive visits to Palermo, Taormina, 
Syracuse, Girgenti, Marsala, Trapani, Selinunte, and Segesta, 
and flying visits to Catania and Messina. 

Sicily is an adorable country. Grass, flowers and fruit- 
trees grow right down to the edge of the sea, where there 
is any soil, for half the island is rock. There are no brigands 
on the sea-coasts, and nearly every monument worth visiting 
is in sight of the sea. There is not a place in the island from 
which you cannot see a mountain. It is the land of the 
orange and the lemon; and possesses the rare charm of 
ancient Greek and mediaeval Arab architecture. 

Sicily inspired me to write the largest of all my books, 
In Sicily, and inspired a publisher to produce it in an edition 
de luxe, whose two volumes weighed fourteen pounds, and 
contained four hundred illustrations. I called it In Sicily 
because it was not until several years afterwards that I 
considered that I knew enough about the island to write a 
book with the more pretentious title of Sicily. A great 
French author paid me the compliment of appropriating my 
title, and a good deal of my information, a few years after- 
wards. I began to write In Sicily in 1896, but it was not 
published till 1901. 

We spent the spring of 1896 in Sicily, and the summer at 
Lulworth, on a little round cove in South Dorset. We went 
there partly because it was said to be the mildest place in 
England, partly because Thomas Hardy told me that he had 
laid the scene of one of the chief episodes in Tess of the D'Ur- 
bervilles in an old farmhouse near the station which served 
Lulworth; it had a hopelessly unromantic name — Wool. 

In the following summer we went to Ostend for the season, 
because I wanted to see the gambling and the fashions. The 
morals of the Ostend of that day may be gathered from 
this. A friend of mine who was staying at the principal hotel 
with her husband, was asked by the proprietor if they were 
properly married. She was most indignant, and said that 
of course they were. 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 209 

" Very well," he said coolly, " then I think you ought to 
go to some other hotel, because you are the only people in 
mine who have been married," 

That same hotel manager considered that things were no 
longer what they were, for an Indian Maharajah had that 
morning complained at being charged two pounds for a 
chicken — that the English and Americans were no longer 
fools, and, in fact, that the only fools left were the Austrians. 

The late King of the Belgians was in residence at the 
chateau, and had not one, but three, notorious French 
actresses staying with him. 

Apart from its plage and its gaming-tables, I should have 
found Ostend a dull place if it had not been for Henry Arthur 
Jones, who was there, off and on, writing a new play, and 
ready to discuss it. He had had a play at the St. James's 
which had not gone too well, and he asked me if I could account 
for it. I suggested that allowing a hospital nurse to frustrate 
an elopement was more calculated to gratify the gallery than 
the stalls, and that the St. James's was a stalls theatre. 

Jones had one curious habit — whenever he felt at a stand- 
still in writing his play he used to say he must have a change 
of air, and then fly away to Homburg or some other place 
which took many hours to reach. He was much interested 
in gambling, though he did not gamble seriously. I imagine 
that he found the gaming-tables full of " copy." 

In the winter we went to Sicily again, and in the summer 
to Salcombe again. 

In the following winter my connection with Who's Who 
ceased. My agreement with the publishers was only for three 
years in case the book was a failure, and the publishers 
pronounced it a failure. 

Almost immediately afterwards I had an attack of jaundice, 
brought on, or not brought on, by the incident, and after a 
short stay at Brighton, went to recruit my health at Nice, 
from which I paid many visits to Monte Carlo, though I did 
not gamble much. 

On our way back from Nice we did what not one English- 
man in a hundred, among the thousands who winter in the 
Riviera, does, got off at Tarascon, and wandered about the 
cities of Troubadour-land, such as Tarascon, Aries, Nimes, 
p 



210 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Avignon and Les Baux, the deserted capital of a dead 
principality, where the houses, instead of being built, are 
hewn out of the face of the rock. Provence is full of ancient 
Roman buildings, and of Romanesque buildings, hardly to 
be distinguished from them ; and, in our day, in spite of the 
law against it, they used the Roman amphitheatres for the 
modern equivalent of gladiatorial games — bull-fights. Bull- 
fighting always began on Easter Sunday. 

I registered a resolve, which I have never kept, to write 
a book about Provence. 

That summer we spent at Cookham on the Thames. 
Since we were unable to go abroad, we went on the river, 
as being the most frankly " Continental " place in England. 
We had perfect weather, and Ostend itself did not give us 
more pleasure than the reach of the river between Cookham 
and Maidenhead. I found lying in a punt outside the lock 
at the Cliveden end conducive for finding incidents for fiction. 

And I had not done sufficient creative work since I began 
Who's Who. Indeed, The Admiral, my novel of the love of 
Nelson and Lady Hamilton, which I finished at Ostend, had 
been nearly my whole output, for Trincolox had been written 
ten years before, and published in Temple Bar. I was, of 
course, working at the materials for In Sicily all the time, 
and in the spring of 1900 we paid another three months' 
visit to Sicily to see that all my facts were up to date. 

We were at Syracuse during the darkest days of the Boer 
War. About half the people in the house were Germans, 
who were openly pleased at the succession of disasters 
which had befallen the British arms before they could get 
proper forces out to South Africa, to fight an enemy who 
was prepared in every single detail before he forced on the 
war. It seemed as if the disasters never would stop, and 
these amiable people told us so every day. But one fine 
day a British battleship, one of the largest then afloat, steamed 
into the great harbour of Syracuse, and anchored in the 
waters where the Athenians were annihilated in their last 
sea-fight against the Syracusans. We were down on the 
quay, and so was nearly every other foreigner in Syracuse, 
when a launch put off from H.M.S., and made towards us. 
The Captain, a typical sea-dog — it was Callaghan, now one 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 211 

of our chief Admirals — was in the stern. As he stepped 
ashore he said : " We have just had a wireless from Malta — 
Kimberley is relieved." It was most dramatic to have the 
news brought to us by the biggest battleship in the Mediter- 
ranean, how French had introduced a new feature into warfare 
by raising a siege with a dash of five thousand cavalry riding 
all day as hard as they could. I shall never forget it. 

We returned to Rome in time for the Papal Jubilee, the 
sixth centenary of the original Jubilee established by Boniface 
VIII in 1300. Some of the ceremonies were extraordinarily 
interesting, and the procession of Leo XIII in St. Peter's 
was one of the most impressive things I ever saw. I think 
it was that which inspired me to write The Secrets of the 
Vatican, though I did not complete it for publication till 
nearly seven years afterwards. 

That summer again we went to Cookham, which had 
serious results, for my son was thrown into contact with 
some charming boys who had just passed into the Army, 
and were spending their vacation from Woolwich at Bourne 
End, a mile up the river from Cookham. Nothing would do 
for him after this but to go into the Army. I did not oppose 
it, because he was an absolutely idle boy at school, and it 
seemed such a good thing that he should want to pass any 
exam., and further, I was almost as much under the glamour 
of those dear boys — poor St. John Spackman, who was 
afterwards killed in the polo-field, was one of them— as he was. 

That inspired me to write My Son Richard, which is a 
story of river life and boys who want to serve their country. 
I took him to Captain James, the leading Army crammer, and 
said that he wanted to get into the Army. In a few home 
questions, James discovered that he had never done any 
work at school, and said he had better go into the Artillery 
— he could not get into the Line. I looked incredulous, and 
he explained that in the Artillery exams, there are papers 
in more subjects which boys do not learn at school, so that 
a boy who has not done any work has not lost time over 
this — such things, for instance, as " fortification " and 
" military topography." 

My son amply fulfilled his prognostications by securing 
ninety per cent, of the marks in the military subjects, and 



212 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

only sixteen marks out of two thousand in Latin. Still, he 
passed, but, to his great disappointment, was not allowed to go 
out to the war which had just begun, because he was too young. 

In this year, 1901, in which both my big book In Sicily 
and my novel My Son Richard, first saw the light, I 
had plenty to do, for I was finishing and attending to the 
publication of Queer Things about Japan, which was the 
best received of all my books of travel. It owed its success 
largely to the timely moment at which I wrote it. Knowing 
Japan well, I was convinced that there was going to be a 
Russo-Japanese war, and Sidney Dark, the brilliant literary 
editor of the Daily Express, as alive a journalist and critic as 
there is in London, was at that time manager of the firm 
of publishers to whom I offered the book, because they had 
recently taken over the publication of the sixpenny edition 
of A Japanese Marriage. It was not hard to convince him 
that there was war in the air for Japan, and he commissioned 
the book with the happiest results. Much of it appeared 
serially in the papers connected with the Tillotson Syndicate, 
which at that time had Philip Gibbs for its editor. He 
accepted my offer to write him eight long instalments about 
Japan for the Syndicate. Just as I had finished and dis- 
patched them, he wrote to tell me that he did not think 
that Japan was a sufficiently live subject, and asked me 
not to write the articles. 

No sooner had he written the letter than he received the 
articles. He read them and thought them so good that he 
sent me a telegram cancelling his letter, and used them. 
They form the backbone of the book. He had asked me to 
be as humorous as possible. Other editors thought them 
very amusing, and when the approach of war made Japan 
the topic of the day, showered commissions on me. 

Norma Lorimer, who was all through Japan with us, was 
of great assistance to me in recalling our life there, and I 
got her a good many commissions for articles, which were 
afterwards collected with some of the articles that I wrote 
during the war into More Queer Things about Japan. 

In this same year, 1901, Hutchinson & Co. published 
My Son Richard, which, as I have said above, was a novel 
about boys who had just passed into the Army, and girls of 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 213 

the same age, spending the summer on the river at Cookham. 
As an instance of rapid printing, I may mention that 
Hutchinson got me all the proofs of this book in seven days, 
but he recently, in 1913, eclipsed this by making the printer 
give me all the proofs of Weeds in six days. 

My Son Richard was very popular. A Duchess wrote to a 
newspaper which was collecting statistics about the popularity 
of books, that this was the nicest book she had ever read, 
and when it came out as a sixpenny, the village grocer at 
Cookham ordered hundreds and told me that every maid- 
servant for miles round was buying it. I wish they would 
buy all my other sixpennies. To reach the servant class is 
a most difficult achievement. 

As Miss Lorimer had broken her leg that year and still 
could not move about much, we went for August to 
Baveno on Lago Maggiore, to an hotel with a garden on 
the lake, where she had a room looking right over the 
exquisite Borromean Islands, Isola Bella and Isola dei 
Pescatori. Italy has always been her favourite subject for 
writing. She corrected the proofs of her By the Waters of 
Sicily here, which is as popular as ever, though it has been 
out for twelve years. 

Baveno had the happiest effect on her. The air is lovely, 
and her window looked right over the finest sweep of Lago 
Maggiore, with the islands in front and the snow-tipped 
Alps behind. Heavy square-prowed barges with junk sails 
used to glide slowly across the eye-line, and light high- 
prowed fishing-boats with hoods like Japanese sampans 
darted about near the shore, which had long pergolas over- 
hanging the lake and Passion-vines sweeping over every shed. 

A month's rest at Baveno made her leg quite well, and 
then we were able to spend a fascinating September in the 
mountain city of Bergamo; Brescia, with its history and 
monuments of a thousand years ; and Venice, which is always 
most adorable in summer. The Feast of the Redentore in 
July is the crown of the year at Venice. We had learnt, and 
we have often made use of our knowledge since, that Italy 
is at her best in summer. 

I do not seem to have published any books in 1902 or 
1903, though I was writing steadily all the time, and had 



214 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

a couple of serials running in a magazine, but I was collecting 
materials hard for the biggest piece of work I have ever 
accomplished. Those who take up Sicily, the New Winter 
Resort, a small octavo, and In Sicily, two immense quartos, 
will be surprised to hear that the smaller book contains a 
far greater amount of reading matter than the larger — half 
as much again, I should say — though the one costs five 
shillings net and the other three guineas. The Directors of 
the Rete Sicula, for whom I compiled the smaller book, 
stipulated that it was to be cheap in price and handy in 
form. This book is an encyclopaedia of Sicily. It itemises 
every monument of any importance, every custom, every 
piece of scenery noted for its beauty, every railway station, 
and gives information about every name which comes 
prominently into the history or the mythology of the island. 
It also gives directions how every monument and beautiful 
piece of scenery is to be reached. 

Nineteen hundred and two was the last summer which 
we spent at Cookham. My son was then at Woolwich, and 
we stayed at Cookham so that he could have his week-ends 
on the river. That winter and spring we again spent in 
Sicily and Italy. But that summer we spent at Tenby for 
the first time, because my son had now been gazetted to a 
Company of Artillery which was stationed at Pembroke Dock. 
Tenby I consider one of the most beautiful coast-places in the 
United Kingdom. It stands on a rock over the sea, and still 
retains a considerable portion of walls and towers built in the 
reign of the third Edward, and restored during the Spanish 
Armada scare in 1588. It has also a magnificent Gothic 
church, and one Gothic house. Its position is hard to beat, 
for its rock stands between two splendid stretches of sand, 
and when the wind blows on one side you are out of the wind 
on the other. On the north sands is a green bluff. If you 
walk inland it is easy to find deep woods, and if you walk 
across the golf-links (there is very good natural golf) you come 
on to noble downs with gorgeous precipices sheering down to 
the sea, and rich in the ruins of historic and prehistoric 
men — literally historic, for there is Geoffry of Monmouth's 
castle of Manorbier, and far beyond, my ancestor Aylmer 
de Valence's castle of Pembroke, which, like the castle of 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 215 

the Carews, rises out of the windings of the great haven of 
the West. 

Such is Tenby, round which, under the name of Flanders, 
I built a romance in my novel. The Unholy Estate. 

The golf-links served both Tenby and the naval and 
military officers at Pembroke Dock. Nearly every day I 
used to meet the Gunner and Infantry subalterns and captains 
disporting themselves on the links, and I was often over at 
Pembroke in the barracks. It was there that I picked up 
my knowledge of young soldiers, which I put into use in 
The Unholy Estate, The Tragedy of the Pyramids and The 
Curse of the Nile. 

The winter we generally spent in Italy, except the winter 
and spring of 1906, when we were once more in Sicily, and 
went across from Sicily to visit Tunis and Carthage. 

In 1904 I was busy putting the finishing touches on two 
books about Japan, More Queer Things about Japan, the 
book in which I collaborated with Norma Lorimer, and 
Playing the Game, which in the cheap editions has had its 
name changed to When We Were Lovers in Japan. This 
book has been running serially in CasselVs Magazine. It 
never had half the popularity or circulation of A Japanese 
Marriage, though it had much more value as a study of 
Japan and the Japanese, for it deals with the transition of 
Japan from a weak Oriental nation to one of the great 
powers of the world, and gives an acid picture of the futility of 
the diplomats to whom Great Britain entrusts her interests. 

In this same year, 1904, Methuen brought out Sicily, the 
New Winter Resort. In 1905 I turned my attention to Sicily 
once more, working up the serial which had appeared in 
CasselVs Magazine into the volume which the publishers 
insisted on christening A Sicilian Marriage, to try and lend 
it some of the popularity of A Japanese Marriage, which it 
never acquired, and the world never discovered that it was 
an excellent popular guide-book to Palermo, Girgenti, Syracuse 
and Taormina. 

In the same year I brought out Queer Things about Sicily, 
a companion volume to Queer Things about Japan, with 
Norma Lorimer. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS : PART II 

In 1906 I was busy writing two books into which a good 
deal of history came, Carthage and Tunis, the Old and New 
Gates of the Orient, and The Secrets of the Vatican, the former 
of which I pubHshed at the end of that year, and the latter 
at the beginning of the following year. 

We were hovering between Italy in the winter, and Tenby 
in the summer, and taking uncommonly little out of our rent 
at 32 Addison Mansions. 

I had always been mightily interested in Carthage. I 
hated Carthage being beaten by Rome, partly, perhaps, 
because history has invested the career of Hannibal and the 
fall of Carthage with such undying romance. When we 
were in Sicily in 1906 we suddenly made up our minds to go 
to Tunis, of which Carthage is practically a suburb, just 
as when we were at Vancouver we suddenly made up our 
minds to take a trip to Japan. 

Carthage is disappointing to those who wish to see Punic 
remains. Of the mighty walls described by Polybius, there 
remains hardly one stone upon another. Its impregnable 
naval harbour and arsenal have dried up into mere ponds — 
in fact, there is nothing Punic about it, except subterranean 
tombs, which you can only reach by being lowered in a 
basket, and the gorgeous coffins and ornaments which came 
out of them, and are preserved in the museum of the White 
Fathers. 

But of Roman Carthage there are plenty of remains — an 
amphitheatre, and a theatre, and mighty underground cis- 
terns, and the foundations of immense churches. In that 
amphitheatre a most interesting lot of saints were martyred, 
St. Perpetua herself among them. 

216 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 217 

No ruins have been discovered connected with the career 
of St. Augustine, the Carthaginian to whom the White 
Fathers attach so much more importance than to Hannibal 
or Hamilcar; and all memories of Dido have hopelessly 
disappeared. Any remains that there might have been of 
the citadel so desperately defended against Scipio, have 
been obliterated by the erection of a cathedral on the site, 
the consummation of the life-work of Cardinal Lavigerie. 
That there is not one human being for a congregation, except 
the White Fathers in the monastery, does not appear to 
signify at all. The cathedral is there, just on the spot where 
you want to forget it most, and think of the tremendous 
human tragedy to which that hill is sacred. 

I loved wandering about the site of Carthage, ruminating 
upon history; I found the study of the saints of Carthage 
fascinating, and gave a good deal of my book to them when 
I came to write about Carthage, in which I also gave trans- 
lations of the very extensive passages which Virgil devotes 
to it, without apparently having possessed any antiquarian 
knowledge at all upon the subject. 

History is very ironical here. You sometimes meet 
wandering, or encamped about the site of Carthage, Berbers, 
lineal descendants of the aborigines dispossessed by Dido 
and her Phoenicians when they founded Carthage, who lasted 
as a race to see Phoenician Carthage perish, and the Christian 
and Roman Carthage, which rose upon its ashes, perish 
likewise before the invading Arabs, and the Arabs, after 
temporary subjugation by this or the other invader, finally 
conquered by the French. Their language, too, has survived, 
though it was in danger of extinction till French scholars 
made its preservation and study a hobby. 

It must not be forgotten that when Carthage came to life 
again she had her revenge on Rome, for the Vandal King 
of Carthage captured Rome, and carries its empress in chains 
to Carthage, with the Table of the Shewbread, the Ark of 
the Covenant, and the Seven-branched Candlestick captured 
by Titus — trophies to which the Romans had ever since 
attached superstitious importance. 

In the last half of 1906 and the spring of 1907 I was 



218 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

unusually busy. We spent the summer for the fourth year in 
succession at Tenby. Eustache de Lorey was there with me 
collaborating in Queer Things about Persia. I planned the 
outline of the book; I suggested subjects for the chapters; 
I extracted some of them by cross-examination; I wrote 
down others when he was in an anecdotal vein. And some 
he wrote in French, and we translated them together. Had 
he been able to accumulate a book in English unaided, there 
was no reason why he should not have written it all himself. 
His careful, slightly foreign English was very effective. But 
I may take this credit to myself, that the book would never 
have been conceived without me, and even had it been con- 
ceived, it would neither have been begun, nor, having been 
begun, would it have been finished, without my professional 
industry. I enjoyed writing it very much indeed. De Lorey 
was such a delightful companion, and I learnt so much about 
Persia by writing a book on it. This sounds like a paradox, 
but it is a universal truth. 

Simultaneously I was engaged on finishing my own book 
on Carthage and Tunis. In this book I had to rely almost 
entirely on French materials, because the two main sources 
of information are the official publications of the French 
authorities, and commercial firms interested in the exploita- 
tion of Tunis, and the publications of the White Fathers out 
at Carthage, about its site and its remains. 

I was also finishing a book upon which I had been at work 
for some years — The Secrets of the Vatican, in which I enjoyed 
the assistance of his Eminence the Cardinal-Archbishop of 
Westminster, in the chapter which dealt with the Church 
crisis in France. 

When I went to ask him to help me, he asked me what I 
was going to call my book. I replied, The Secrets of the 

Vatican. He said, " Doesn't it sound rather " — instead 

of giving me the word, he gave a sniff. I shall never forget 
that sniff — it expressed the whole situation. I hastened to 
explain that the Secrets were all archaeological secrets, and 
he handed me the materials for my chapter. 

Some time before this, he had asked our mutual friend, 
Cortesi, Renter's agent at Rome, to tell me a story of the 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 219 

Pope, in connection with my Sicily, the New Winter Resort. 
Cardinal Bourne had taken a tour in Sicily, using my Sicily 
as his guide. When he got back to Rome, he showed an 
anecdote in the book to the Pope. The anecdote was about 
Cardinal Newman, who had told me an extraordinary experi- 
ence he had had in Sicily. It was at Castrogiovanni, where 
he lay for some weeks between life and death, suffering from 
a fever, which was the result of his being totally robbed of 
sleep by fleas when he was making a tour round Etna. The 
greatest affliction with which he had to contend was the 
incessant ringing of church bells — Castrogiovanni, the Enna 
of Ceres and Proserpine, has more churches for its size 
than any city in Sicily. Poor Newman's only chance of 
sleep, which meant life to him, was to keep his head under 
the bedclothes in that semi-tropical climate. The inhabit- 
ants went about aghast, saying that he had a devil. The 
Pope thought the idea of the future Prince of the 
Church (Protestant though he was then) having a devil, 
was ludicrously funny, and laughed till his sides ached, 
like an ordinary man. When Newman did recover from 
the fever, and was on his way from Sicily to Sardinia in 
a fruit boat, he wrote his famous hymn, " Lead, kindly 
light." 

The Secrets of the Vatican formed one half of a book which 
I began as a commission from Eveleigh Nash some years 
before. The numerous changes in non-papal Rome, and the 
important excavations of its pagan monuments, which were 
announced, but postponed and postponed, made me despair 
of ever getting the book finished, and finally I decided to 
publish the part which related to the Vatican in a volume 
by itself. This, after going through three editions, has 
been, for further publication, divided into two parts. The 
personal matter about the present Pope, and the information 
about the ceremonies which relate to the election, coronation, 
death and burial of a Pope, and about the composition of 
his court, are still published by Hurst & Blackett, with 
certain additional information on the subject, under the 
title of The Pope at Home, while the part which relates to 
the history, architecture and collections of the Vatican, is 



220 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

now published by Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., under the 
title of How to See the Vatican. 

The Secrets of the Vatican was published in 1907, a few 
months before we began our memorable expedition to Egypt, 
which has played such an important part in my writings 
ever since. 

Having to study economy in our travels, we determined 
to break the journey to Egypt in Italy, and with that idea 
went to Lake Como in the last days of July 1907. 

Anything more beautiful than Lago di Como in August it 
is difficult to conceive. All the way up its west side the lake 
is fringed with crimson oleanders in full blossom. Though 
the days are cloudless, and the nights encrusted with stars, 
by perfect summer weather, there are no mosquitoes. It is 
a land of peaches, and of old villas with gardens, which look 
as if they had come down from the ancient Romans, with 
their vases and pavilions and terraces and broad flights of 
steps leading down into the clear water of the lake — ^this is 
the lake from Arconati to Cadenabbia. 

Here we spent a month under the acacia and tulip trees, 
revelling in fruit and flowers, before we went south to Como 
City; and east to Sermione, in the reedy shallows of Lago 
di Garda, dominated by the castle of the Scaligers, which 
loses not one ray of sunshine from sunrise to sunset; to 
storied Mantua in its marches ; to Verona, half ancient Roman, 
half Gothic, and wholly romantic, and to Venice the matchless. 

Venice is a stone city conjured up from the sea. In the 
city proper there is no more earth than you might have in 
roof-gardens. There are no horses, no motors. You seem 
to be living on the roof of the sea. The palaces, which rise 
from the water in such unending succession, were mostly 
built in the Middle Ages, when Venice had the sea-trade of 
the world. The finest of them line the Grand Canal from 
side to side for a mile from its mouth, and at its mouth are 
the most beautiful buildings in Europe, which have been 
standing there three and four and five hundred years at the 
head of the stately flight of steps where the world once 
came to the feet of Venice — St. Mark's, the Doge's Palace, 
and the Library, surrounding that Piazetta of smooth white 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 221 

flagstones. You feel that they are too beautiful to be true, 
that they must be the airy fabric of a vision, which will 
presently pass away, and leave not a wrack behind. 

I never go to Venice without wondering why I can live 
away from it. Yet I have never published my tribute to it, 
except in periodicals, and in the pages about it which come 
into my How to See Italy. 

I have to say the same of Florence, to which we moved 
from Venice on our progress through Italy to Egypt. Like 
Venice, I have visited it many times, and I find Florence 
one of the most inspiring cities in the world. The Venetian, 
unless he be a guide or a gondolier, is silent to foreigners; 
he takes no account of them ; there are few foreigners living 
in Venice. But in Florence there are five thousand foreigners, 
who talk about the glories of Florence every day, and all the 
inhabitants seem to be children of the Medici Florence, who 
think that every foreigner's mind should be in the Florence 
of the Middle Ages. You talk pictures or history all day 
long. 

From Florence we went on to Rome and Naples, where 
we were to take ship for Egypt. Of Rome I have written 
much in How to See Italy, as well as in The Secrets of the 
Vatican, which contained the fruit of years of study. I have 
also published in periodicals enough to fill another book 
about the parts which belong to the kingdom of Italy, as 
the Vatican belongs to the Papacy. To Rome I go back 
regularly. About Rome I intend to publish a book like 
How to See Italy, and Sicily, the New Winter Resort, combined, 
to make use of my street by street study of the Eternal 
City. I know Rome far better than London. Rome has 
always appealed to my historical enthusiasm, in the one 
point where Florence leaves me cold, for Florence was, as 
it were, at the back of the door while kingdoms were being 
carved out of the unformed mass of Europe during the 
Middle Ages, while Rome gave the world laws, language 
and civilisation, collated from the wisdom of the ancient 
world. 

Naples itself is not an inviting town, but it slopes up from 
one of the most beautiful bays in the world, and it is rich in 



222 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

outstanding objects — Capri in front, Vesuvius on the left, 
the hill of Posilippo on the right, and the three great castles, 
St. Elmo, del Ovo and Nuovo, which make the points of 
a vast triangle from the sea to the mountain-top, while in 
the centre is the rock of Parthenope, now called the Falcon's 
Peak, the site of Palsepolis, the old city, which came before 
Neapolis, the new city. 

The outskirts of Naples are of the highest interest, for on 
the south side the disinterred ruins of Pompeii and Hercu- 
lanaeum lie under their destroyer, Vesuvius, the most in- 
teresting volcano in the world; and on the other are Cumae, 
the first settlement of the Greeks in the virgin lands of 
Italy, which was their America; and all the volcanic pheno- 
mena, which furnished Roman mythology with the details 
of its Hades. 

Pompeii is of undying interest to me, especially since the 
new custom has come in of leaving any fresh treasures which 
are discovered, in situ. There is no place where, if you study 
it in conjunction with the collections in the museum of Naples, 
you can so easily picture the life of the Greeks and Romans 
as at Pompeii. I have many times thought of writing upon 
Pompeii. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS : PART III 

It was Benton Fletcher, one of the " identities " of Egypt, 
equally well known as an artist who does valuable work in 
connection with excavations and does delightful landscapes, 
which are the fashion with " winterers " in Egypt, who first 
put into my head the idea of visiting that matchless country. 
Egypt is literally matchless ; there is no country in the world 
which has such a winter climate, and no country in the world 
which has monuments so ancient and so perfect, so close 
together and so accessible. Every monument which is not 
in an oasis is on the Nile, and the Nile in Egypt is like a 
railway in other countries. 

Fletcher not only worked up my enthusiasm to the point 
of going there, but met us on our arrival in Cairo, and initiated 
me in the secret beauties of the Arab city. But for him 
Oriental Cairo would never have been written. 

I was also much influenced by the photographs published 
by Leo Weinthal in The African World and Fascinating 
Egypt. 

We sailed from Naples to Alexandria in the November of 
1907. We did not delay an hour there, but took the next 
train to Cairo. 

At Alexandria Egypt is Roman, and the monuments which 
have yet been excavated are not, with the exception of one 
marvellous late tomb, very interesting. But Alexandria 
is an unexcavated Pompeii, and when some Schliemann 
among its leading merchants decides to devote his energies 
and his fortune to excavating the vast mounds which still 
bury Roman Alexandria, we may expect finds of astonishing 
interest. In the desert, about thirty miles from Alexandria, 
is the city of St. Menas, an early Christian Pompeii, where there 

223 



224 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

has already been excavated a wonderful Basilica founded 
by the Emperor Arcadius. 

Except for a few articles in the Queen, I did little writing 
in Egypt beyond taking copious notes. But these I did 
more completely than I ever had done before, and as my 
secretary was with us, they were typed out every evening, 
and are now bound together into a sort of diary- journal of 
our entire visit. To make them more complete as journals, 
I took eight hundred photographs, and certainly bought as 
many more, and as complete a collection of postcards as I 
could form. Therefore I was in a very sound position for 
writing my various books upon Egypt after I had returned 
home. The first book I wrote upon our visit was Egypt and 
the English, consisting partly of what we saw while we were 
staying in Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Assuan, the Fayyum, 
the Great Oasis, and while we were journeying up the Nile 
to the second cataract, and down the Nile to its Rosetta and 
Damietta mouths, and over the Desert Railway into the 
Sudan; and partly of the result of my inquiries about the 
political condition of Egypt. When the book came out, 
many reviewers took up the attitude that what I said was 
too alarmist, but when Mr. Roosevelt repeated it to the letter, 
the Government took the warnings seriously, and appointed 
the best possible man. Lord Kitchener, to take the place 
of Sir Eldon Gorst, whose policy of scuttle and kowtow may 
have been dictated by the Government which appointed him. 

I knew that my facts were sound, because I had not only 
sucked as much information as I could out of British officials 
and editors, and the Leader of the Egyptian Bar, but also 
from the leading Syrians and Armenians, who see much more 
behind the scenes than the English, because Arabic is their 
business language, and the Arabs associate with them freely 
in private life. Among Syrians especially I had repeated 
conversations with Dr. Sarruf and Dr. Nimr, the proprietor 
and editor of El Mokattan, the most important Arab paper 
in Egypt, to whose opinions Lord Cromer had always attached 
the greatest importance, and they had told me how to meet 
such of the Nationalist leaders as spoke English. These 
were actual Egyptians, so Egypt and the English did give 




HALL CAINE 
Drawn by Yothio Markino 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 225 

native opinion both directly from the mouths of Egyptians, 
and indirectly through Syrians and Armenians. 

I wrote Egypt and the English for a commission to write 
Queer Things about Egypt. The then chairman of Hurst 
& Blackett, when he saw the political chapters in the 
book, considered them so interesting and important that he 
asked me to hold over the humorous chapters for another 
book. Which I did. But in the interval he sold the business 
of Hurst & Blackett to my old friends Hutchinson & Co., 
who published my real first success. The Japs at Home. 
They were quite ready to take another book on Egypt from 
me, and we decided to make these chapters the nucleus of 
that book to be published under the original title of Queer 
Things about Egypt. This book gives the humours of the 
native city in Cairo, and the humours of travel on the Nile. 
The parts of the book which attracted most attention were 
those which dealt with Arab life in Cairo in the native quarters 
round the Citadel, and with Arab architecture and art, so 
Hutchinson asked me to do another large volume on Egypt, 
devoted entirely to Oriental Cairo — the City of the Arabian 
Nights. For that part of Cairo is almost as much an Arab 
City of the Middle Ages as was Granada in the days of the 
Moors, and the stories of the Arabian Nights were made into 
a book by a Cairene in the sixteenth century. 

Egypt and the English was published in 1908, Queer Things 
about Egypt in 1910, and Oriental Cairo in 1910. 

In 1908 I also wrote, and Hurst & Blackett published. 
The Tragedy of the Pyramids, which has been one of the most 
successful of my novels. It was written as a counterblast 
to Hall Caine's White Prophet, which at that time was running 
as a serial in the Strand Magazine. I considered that Caine 
was giving an entirely incorrect impression of our army in 
Egypt. The book is now in its ninth edition, and was an 
imaginary picture of the revolution which would have over- 
taken Egypt, if Sir Eldon Gorst's scuttle and kowtow policy 
had been persisted in. I had a great deal to say about the 
Senussi in this book — the battle of the Pyramids was fought 
against a great host of invading Senussi. The British public 
had then heard little of the Senussi. But in the Turko- 
Q 



226 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Italian war the Senussi have proved a far more dangerous 
enemy to Italy than the Turks, as they are very hardy and 
move with great rapidity. They are said to own many zawia, 
or convents, in Egypt, and to have established a network of 
wells at twenty-four hours' distance from each other all over 
the great desert of the Sahara — also to have twenty-five 
thousand swift camels accumulated against any invasion of 
their country, which is almost conterminous with the great 
desert. Boyd Alexander, the famous explorer, is considered 
to have fallen a victim to his intrusion upon their territory, 
which they openly forbid to Christians, on pain of being assas- 
sinated. But their Prophet refused to join forces in any way 
with the Mahdi when he had possessed himself of the Egyptian 
Sudan. 

The Tragedy of the Pyramids was published in 1909, Queer 
Things about Egypt, and Oriental Cairo, in 1910, the same 
year which saw the publication of The Moon of the Fourteenth 
Night, the romance which I wrote in collaboration once more 
with Eustache de Lorey. As it had so much of the travel-book 
about it, it was not brought out in the form of a novel. It 
was, in fact, the biography of a dashing young French attache, 
who is still alive, pretty faithfully told. He had no objection 
to our using it if we killed him off in the book, to throw the 
girl's relations off the track, in case they should try to kill 
him in real life. The public never realised that it was actually 
reading a romance of real Ife, that there had been such a person 
as Bibi Mah, that the escapades of Edward Valmont were not 
imaginary, but episodes in a career of gallantry. The book 
comes very near to being a journal of life in the Persian 
capital at the beginning of the revolution. 

In the autumn of 1908 we went back to Itay to spend the 
six cold months in Rome, hoping that we should have one 
of those winters which you sometimes get in Rome, as full 
of sunshine as spring — only cold when you are in the wind and 
out of the sun. Yoshio Markino spent that winter with us at 
12 Piazza Barberini. I got my friend Percy Spalding, 
one of the directors of Chatto & Windus, to give him a com- 
mission to do the illustrations for The Colour of Rome, and 
as I knew Rome so well, I conducted him to nearly all the 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 227 

beauty-spots which furnished the subjects of his illustrations. 
I showed him many others which did not appeal to him, for 
Markino will not begin a picture until some motif in the 
locality has appealed to his artistic temperament. He is an 
artist to the finger-tips. His fidelity is all the more extra- 
ordinary when you take into consideration his method of 
painting a landscape. 

In those days he had written nothing but a short chapter 
in The Colour of London, and The Colour of Paris, but he 
used to show me the letters he wrote to Spalding and Ward, of 
Chatto's, about the book, — most brilliant some of them were, 
and I saw that he was a born writer. I suggested to him as 
early as this that he should write his life in Japan — I had not 
then grasped what a story he had to tell of his life in England. 

He felt the cold in Rome very severely. He used to con- 
sume quantities of the childish substitutes for fuel provided 
in Roman hotels. 

In that first visit which he paid to Italy, he was not much 
interested in the architecture or the art, just as he never 
visited the Louvre while he was in Paris painting The 
Colour of Paris. And the scenes of historical events inter- 
ested him little more, though often they played an important 
part in the history of the world. He was absorbed in the 
novel lines of buildings ; the gay colours of Italy ; the strange- 
ness to him of the atmospheric effects of Rome; the subtle 
and ceaseless humours in the life of the Italian poor. And 
their clothes delighted him, with their gay, faded colours, 
their rags, and the fine abandon with which they were worn. 

We were in Rome collecting materials for my book on 
How to See Italy, and I was writing the Tragedy of the Pyramids 
mostly in bed, before I got up in the morning. Between 
five and eight a.m. is a favourite time for writing with me. 
I seldom begin later than 5.45 ; I have a cup of tea brought 
to me at 6 a.m. I also wrote a good deal in periodicals about 
the great earthquake at Messina. The Italian papers were 
naturally full of details, which had not been telegraphed to 
England, and we used to get wonderful cinema films, which 
made one quite an eye-witness of the events. In Italy you 
can go to the cinema for twopence. 



228 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

I was about to make a tour of the earthquake scenes in 
South Italy and Sicily, and to go on to Malta, where my son 
was then quartered, when I was suddenly called home by the 
alarming illness of my father, who was given up by the doctors, 
though he recovered and lived for nearly two years afterwards. 

We re-visited a few favourite spots, such as Pisa and Lucca, 
on our way up, as we did not hope to see Italy again for some 
time. 

As it chanced, it was little more than a year before we were 
back in Italy again, on the most interesting tour which we 
have ever spent in that country. I had a commission from 
Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. to write for them How to See 
Italy, which was destined to be so popular, and there 
were forty-five cities in Italy which I wished to visit or re- 
visit before writing this book. I wrote it for the Italian Govern- 
ment, as Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. were aware, and they had 
offered me many facilities. They had the blocks made for 
the illustrations. I went over their entire collection of photo- 
graphs in making my choice, and where no photograph 
existed, they sent their special photographer to take one. 
Also they allowed me to travel about on their lines wherever 
my wish took me free of charge, so I was able to wander about 
Italy in a way in which the expenses would ordinarily have 
been too great for any book. 

Markino went with us again on this journey, which lasted 
from July to November. This time I had got him a com- 
mission from Constable & Co. to illustrate a book by Miss 
Potter, which was published under the title of A Little 
Pilgrimage in Italy. 

We visited all our cities, starting from Genoa, and proceed- 
ing to Florence, Arezzo, Cortona, Perugia, Deruta, Todi, 
Siena, St. Gimignano, Passignano, Monte Oliveto, Asciano, 
Chiusi, Citta della Pieve, Assisi, Foligno, Spoleto, Spello, 
Bevagna, Montefalco, Trevi, Clitunno, Gualdo Tadino, 
Gubbio, Urbino, Rimini, Ravenna, San Marino, Ancona, 
Loreto, Terni, Narni, Orvieto, Viterbo, Ferento, Bagnaja, 
Monte Fiascone, Rome, Tivoli, Milan. 

As soon as we had left the mountain heights of Arezzo and 
Cortona, the Etruscan eyries from which the Romans marched 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 229 

down to their red fate on the shores of the lake Trasimene, 
we learned how hot mid-Italy can be in midsummer. Even 
on the rock of Perugia, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, 
you could not walk on the sunny side of the street without 
an umbrella on account of the risk of sunstroke, and the 
heat was almost unendurable as we drove across the hills 
the thirty or forty miles to Todi, a little city which the Gods 
of the Middle Ages have kept to themselves. 

Perugia was always defiant, from Etruscan times. With a 
man like Duke Frederick of Urbino to rule and lead its fierce 
citizens, Perugia would have been more potent than Urbino, 
or Rimini, or Mantua, or Ferrara, perhaps a city of the first 
rank, like Milan or Florence. Its rock made the whole city 
a citadel, and it sits astride the road from Rome to the Alps, 
with the fertile Vale of Umbria to provision it. 

The Vale of Umbria below Assisi is only rivalled by the 
shores of Lake Trasimene in the beauty of its women — we 
know them from the pictures of Raphael, Perugino, and 
Pinturricchio. I wish I could put its magic into words — 
the nobility of its farm-houses, the soft grace of its orchards 
and olive-gardens, its antique hermitages. 

Summer in the Vale of Umbria was perfect, and certain of 
its beauties were such as could only be seen in summer, like 
the translucent sources of the Clitumnus, which, with their 
lawny banks, remind you of the Twenty-third Psalm. I 
would rather go and see them, below the tall poplars which are 
a landmark across the plain, than the graceful little Roman 
temple above them, which is a landmark for travellers. 

Foligno is only a walk from exquisite Spello, a city which 
is a hill covered with Gothic houses. Foligno and the cities 
on the hills round it are rich in great pictures by small 
masters ; but Spoleto is, after Perugia, the prize city of Umbria. 
It is rich in monuments of all ages; in its walls it has 
prehistoric masonry of three ages; it defied the assaults of 
Hannibal ; you can still see the house of Vespasian's mother, 
and other Roman monuments of the classic age; it is rich 
in the handiwork of the forgotten centuries which followed ; 
it has a church built like a pagan temple in the fourth century 
after Christ; it has the most stupendous aqueduct in Italy, 



230 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

carried across a valley from the hill of Groves, on arches 
two hundred and fifty feet high; and a unique cathedral, 
planted in the valley, like its other great church ; it was the 
capital of the only King of Italy who bore the title before 
Victor Emmanuel. Standing on the hillside, embosomed in 
groves, looking over the plain, in an amphitheatre of moun- 
tains, Spoleto is a place which never leaves the memory. 

We went straight from it to most famous cities — Gubbio 
was not its equal, except when the sunset fired the fayade of 
its city hall, six hundred years old and three hundred feet 
high; and Urbino, on its dizzy height, crowned with the 
fantastic palace of Duke Frederick, is a prosaic place beside 
it ; Ravenna, for all its mosaiced churches, built by Justinian 
and his successors, when the first millennium was half spent, 
has no glory of site, nor has Rimini; Ancona has only its 
site and its glorious Byzantine cathedral, on a green hill 
between two seas. 

We wandered from town to town such as these ; we drove 
all day from Rimini to San Marino, the castled eagle's nest, 
which is still an independent Republic; we went to Loreto 
on the Virgin's day, and saw peasants, who had come in 
ox-carts from the recesses of the Apennines. We stood below 
and above the stupendous waterfalls of Terni, the most 
stupendous in Europe. But we saw no naturally nobler 
city than Spoleto. 

All that summer we wandered about the byways of Tuscany, 
Umbria, Latium, and the March of Ancona. We hardly 
ever saw an English face. We stayed for the most part in 
humble native inns. It was a hot summer, even for Italy, 
but we were not frightened by the heat from going where we 
meant to go, nor by the fetish of malaria, for we stayed a 
week at Ravenna in September. We never enjoyed ourselves 
more in our lives. We tested an Italian summer fairly on 
the hot plains and sun-baked hills. I needed the experience 
to write How to See Italy. 

It was a guide-book on a new principle. While I was writing 
of the cities and scenery of Italy, generally I grouped them in 
provinces, but I devoted other chapters to the hobbies of 
travellers. I told the lover of paintings where all the best 



THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS 231 

paintings in Italy are to be found, and which places have the 
richest galleries. I did the same for the lovers of architecture, 
sculpture, mosaics, and scenery. I told the traveller how 
to see all the principal sights of Italy by rail, without going 
the same railway journey twice, and I tried to convert English 
travellers to the delightful native inns of Italy, and I gave them 
the prices of inns all over Italy. 

The idea of the book was, briefly, to enable any one to 
see at a glance which parts of Italy he ought to visit in pursuit 
of his special studies. And I had three special chapters on 
the changes in Rome, which have made all the old books on 
Rome out of date. 

When we reached London in the late autumn, I found a 
sad change in my father, who had reached the great age 
of eighty-six. He had lost much of his memory, and very 
often did not care to speak. He gradually failed, until one 
night between Christmas and the New Year he passed away 
quite peacefully, holding my hand. 

I sold the house on Campden Hill — Phillimore Lodge — in 
which he had lived for nearly fifty years, to Sir Walter Philli- 
more. The estate was so burdened with legacies, made 
while he was a much richer man, that I should have lost by 
accepting my inheritance if I had not sold all the real estate. 

I had no wish to live there. For years it had been my inten- 
tion to leave London when I no longer had my father to 
consider. I wanted to go to some rural spot just outside 
London, where I could have pleasure in being at home in the 
summer months, because I like going abroad in the winter, 
and you must make use of your house some time during the 
year. At Addison Mansions we were only at home for a 
month or two in some years. 

I set about looking for a new house almost immediately, 
and after nearly taking an old Queen Anne mansion in the 
Sheen Road, finally settled on the Avenue House, Richmond, 
which stands in the north-west corner of the old Green, with 
its front windows looking down the Avenue, and across the 
Green to the Old Palace, and its back windows looking over 
the old Deer Park and the Mid-Surrey Golf Club to the trees 
of Kew Gardens. In the winter we can see a mile or two of 



232 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

grass and trees from those windows, and the river when the 
tide is high. The house suited me perfectly ; it had a charming 
old-fashioned garden, with ancient trees, a cedar of Lebanon, 
a mulberry, and an arbutus, which covers itself with flowers 
and fruit, among them, besides two great wistarias and many 
flowering laburnums, lilacs and hawthorns. I added rockeries 
in the Sicilian style, and various features of a Japanese 
garden. 

The house had the further advantage of being only a few 
minutes' walk from the railway- stations, from golf at Mid- 
Surrey, and from one of the most beautiful reaches of the 
Thames. 

Here I have written the present book. The Unholy Estate, 
The Curse of the Nile, and my parts of Adam Lindsay Gordon 
and His Friends in England and Australia, and Weeds ; and 
I was here when How to see Italy was published. 

I was sorry in a way to say good-bye to Addison Mansions, 
which had been my home during the most interesting years 
of my life. I liked the rooms ; I should have liked to transport 
them to Richmond. 



CHAPTER XIX 

HOW I WROTE " who's WHO " 

Of all the books I have written, none have attracted more 
attention than Who's Who. 

Various biographical dictionaries of living persons were 
in existence before the new Who's Who appeared in 1897 — 
Men of the Time, People of the Period, and so on. But none 
of them were annual, and none of them were published at a 
popular price. I myself had attempted to get a cheap 
annual biographical dictionary published, before A. & C. 
Black came to me with their proposal about Who's Who, I 
put the idea into the hands of a literary agent for sale. It 
was very much on the lines of Who's Who, but not on so 
ambitious a scale, and I thought that Sell, who has a Press 
directory, might be likely to buy it. No one did buy it, 
and when I told an interviewer, who came to get " copy " 
out of me about Who's Who, about it, that agent was wrong- 
headed enough to think that I was trying to libel him, instead 
of trying to claim originality for my idea. 

However that may be, Adam Black, one day, when I was 
talking to him about my novel, A Japanese Marriage, which 
A. & C. Black had published, produced a copy of the old 
Who's Who, an insignificant pocket-peerage, of which he 
had just purchased the rights, and asked if I could make any- 
thing of it for the firm. Having made a synopsis of my own 
idea for that literary agent to sell, I had it cut and dry, 
and it was settled that I should do the book as soon as the 
agreement could be drawn up. As events proved, it was drawn 
up too hurriedly, for I signed it without insisting on the clause 
which has gone into all my other agreements of the same kind 
— that, in case the publishers wished to be released from the 
agreement because the book was not as successful as they 



234 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

hoped, the book should become my property. I do not say 
that the Blacks would have consented to the insertion of 
this clause, but it is certain that I ought never to have signed 
it without, because I put into it ideas, whose originality 
and value has abundantly been proved since. It was agreed 
that I should edit it for three years certain, but that if the 
book was not successful by then the agreement should 
terminate. At the end of the three years, they determined 
that the book was not a success, and terminated the agreement. 
At the time that I wrote this book there was no one in 
London with the same knowledge as I had as to who should 
be included in the book, because my three years' work in 
New York papers had made me take up biographical journal- 
ism — a profession which did not exist in London till I brought 
it over from America, and which never took permanent 
root in England. In fact, it very soon withered out of 
existence. 

jit is an odd fact that this book in its dried pippin form, 
which went on for about half a century before it was expanded, 
never struck the world as having a specially good title, till 
Adam Black recognised its value, though now its title is 
regarded as a stroke of genius. 

"But how are you going to get the information?" he 
asked, when I had detailed my formula for the biographies, 
much the same as that which is used for Who^s Who now, 
with the exception of the details about telephones and motors, 
which were not part of English everyday life in 1897, and a 
few other points which I ought to have thought of. 
" I shall make the people themselves give it." 
" But will they ever do it? " 

" I think so, if we give them proper forms to fill up, and 
get a well-known peer and a well-known commoner to fill 
up their forms as specimens before we send the others out." 
" You'll have to tell them that you're going to use their 
biographies as specimens. I wish nothing to be done of which 
anybody could complain." 

In the matter of the special stationery provided for the 
purpose, the firm were extraordinarily liberal. They only 
studied attractiveness, just as they had special type cast for 



HOW I WROTE 'WHO'S WHO' 235 

setting up the book because none of the small types offered to 
us were sufficiently beautiful. The selection of the long blue 
envelopes, opening at the side, has an almost public interest. 
Adam Black requested that we should leave the matter of 
envelopes over until the following week, when he was to meet 
Lord Rosebery on the yacht of his brother-in-law, George 
Coates. When Lord Rosebery was asked what kind of 
envelope he should treat with most respect in opening his 
correspondence. Lord Rosebery pronounced in favour of this 
particular form of long blue envelope, because it was used by 
the Cabinet for their communications. So we adopted it, 
and the first persons in official circles who received it may have 
experienced a strange flutter of expectation, because we did 
not in those days, I think, have the envelopes stamped 
Who's Who, lest they should defeat their object of being 
taken for Cabinet communications. 

Then came the question of whom we should invite to write 
their biographies to be models for the biographies of other 
people. I selected the Duke of Rutland for the peers, and 
Mr. Balfour for the commoners. The Duke, both as Lord 
John Manners and as Duke, had occupied one of the first 
places in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen. He had filled 
his place in the Cabinet with distinction; he had been the 
typical aristocrat; his exquisite politeness had helped the 
democracy to forgive him for writing " Let Wealth and 
Commerce . . . die. But give us still our old nobility." 

I wrote to ask him to fill the biographical form, which I had 
drawn up, to be the model for other members of the peerage, 
and with his usual consideration, he acceded. Then I wrote 
to Mr. Balfour to ask him to write his biography, to be a model 
for the untitled. The only title he bore was so proud that 
we usually, as I did then, forget to reckon it among titles — 
the " Right Honourable." Mr. Balfour, too, acceded, and 
he was particularly suitable, because, in addition to being the 
first man in the House of Commons, recreation had a real 
meaning in his case, since he was known to be an inveterate 
golfer. 

The idea of adding " recreations " to the more serious 
items which had been included in previous biographical 



236 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

dictionaries was adopted at one of the councils of war 
which we used to hold in the partners' room of A. & C. 
Black, at 4 Soho Square. And for selling purposes it 
proved far and away the best idea in the whole book, when it 
was published. The newspapers were never tired of quoting 
the recreations of eminent people, thus giving the book a 
succession of advertisements of its readability, and shop- 
keepers who catered for their various sports bought the book 
to get the addresses of the eminent people, who were, many 
of them, very indignant at the Niagara of circulars which 
resulted. 

I wonder if many people remember the old Who's Who ? — 
a little red 32mo, which looked something like the Infantry 
Manual with its clasp knocked off. It was a sort of badly kept 
index to the Peerage, as futile as an 1840 Beauty Book. 
We turned it into a dictionary of biography for living people, 
and we made it eternally interesting by persuading the people 
whom we included in it to give us their favourite recreations. 
I chose (from an un-annual biographical dictionary edited by 
Humphry Ward) the type, which had to be specially cast 
for it; I chose the people who deserved to be included in it; 
I drafted the letters and the forms to be filled up, which were 
sent to each person ; and I persuaded those two very eminent 
men to be the bell-wethers for persuading other people to 
fill up their forms, an idea which was crowned with success. 
The late Duke of Rutland's and Mr. Balfour's fillings up of 
the forms were printed at the heads of the forms sent out to 
other people, and few people objected to following where they 
had led the way. But among these few recalcitrants were 
Lord Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain, and most naval officers. 
Army officers, on the other hand, were generally very oblig- 
ing. Architects and literary men filled up their forms best, 
artists and actresses worst, though actors were almost as 
bad. You would have thought that the actual formation 
of the letters in framing a reply was a torture to artists, 
actors and naval officers. The actresses, if you had compiled 
the biographies by interview, would have asked for two columns 
each. 

Many people thought it necessary to write me rude letters, 



HOW I WROTE 'WHO'S WHO' 237 

demanding what right I had to intrude upon their privacy, 
and ordering me not to include their names. To one of them, 
the head of an Oxford College, I wrote. " Dear Sir, If you had 

not been head of College, no onejwould have dreamt of 

including you, but since you are, you will have to go in whether 
you like it or not." 

The late Duke of Devonshire said that his recreation had 
formerly been hunting. One man said that he did not see 
how the ownership of four hundred and fifty thousand acres 
made him a public person. A prominent authoress first 
of all refused to fill up her form at all. I wrote to tell her 
that in that case I should have to fill it up for her. She 
showed no concern about this until I sent her a proof of the 
biography, in which I made her out ten years older than she 
really was, and said that I meant to insert the biography in 
that form unless there was anything she wished to correct. 
She then corrected it, and added so much that it would have 
taken the whole column if I had inserted all she sent. 

W. S. Gilbert wrote the rudest letter of anybody. He said 
he was always being pestered by unimportant people for 
information about himself. So I put him down in the book 
as " Writer of Verses and the libretti to Sir Arthur Sullivan's 
comic operas." He then wrote me a letter of about a thousand 
words, in which he asked me if that was the way to treat a 
man who had written seventy original dramas. Next year 
he filled up his form as readily as a peer's widow who has 
married a commoner. 

Bernard Shaw said in 1897 that his favourite recreations 
were cycling and showing off, and informed the world that 
he was of middle-class family, was not educated at all 
" academically," and coming to London when he was twenty, 
for many years could obtain no literary recognition, even to 
the extent of employment as a journalist. 

But the most humorous experience I had in connection 
with Who's Who was when I succeeded in bringing a certain 
actor-manager to book. He had repeatedly promised to 
fill in his form, and failed to do so, when I found myself next 
to him at a public dinner to which we had both been invited. 
" Why did you not send me that biography? " I asked him, 



238 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

and he said, " Well, the real reason is that I thought I should 
have to say how damned badly I have behaved to my wife." 

The book was a complete literary success ; the newspapers 
gave it column reviews, chiefly consisting of the unsuitable 
recreations of prominent people. 

When I edited it, Who's Who contained a great deal of 
information besides the biographies, such as lists of peculiarly 
pronounced proper names, keys to the pseudonyms of promi- 
nent people, names of the editors of the principal papers. 
Some of the real names were so unreasonable that people wrote 
to know why they were not included in the lists of pseudonyms ; 
one of these was Sir Louis Forget. 

Ascertaining the correct pronunciation of peculiar names 
was very diverting; there was such a divergence of opinion 
among people of Scottish birth about words like " Brechin." 
I was bewailing their egotism to the late Lord Southesk, 
when he said, " I have been collecting peculiarly pronounced 
Scottish names and their proper pronunciation for years. 
You can have my list." 

I thanked him and gladly inserted them all. A very good 
friend of mine, the late Hugh Maclaughlan, who was sub-editor 
of the Star and Leader, in reviewing the book over his own 
name, found great fault with my Cockney pronunciation 
of the Scottish names. I do not know to this day whether 
he was serious, or, as schoolboys say, " pulling my leg," and 
in any case, I did not mind, but Lord Southesk was furious. 

" Tell Mr. Maclaughlan," he said, " that I am the man whom 
he called a Cockney, and that my ancestor commanded the 
Highlanders at the battle of Harlaw." Harlaw was the last 
great battle between the Highlanders and the Lowlanders, 
and was fought in the year 1411. 

One of the funniest entries in the book was made by a 
famous authoress, who wrote in her biography " she is at 
present unmarried." 

One of the most amusing experiences I had when I was 
editor of Who's Who was my receiving a message from a 
Mrs. Williams or Williamson, asking me to call on her upon 
a matter of great importance. I imagined that at the very 
least Queen Victoria (Mrs. Williams was supposed to have 



HOW I WROTE 'WHO'S WHO' 239 

influence in such matters) had deputed her to offer me a 
knighthood. At any rate, from the tone of her letter, it 
ought to have been a considerable advantage of some sort 
which was to be bestowed upon me. I was not much flustered 
because the lady had not the reputation of giving anything 
for nothing. But I own I was rather taken aback when I 
was shown into her den, and she said, " I sent for you because 
Mrs. Dotheboy Tompkins " — or some such name — nobody of 
the slightest importance — " wishes you to put her into 
Who's Who:' 

I said, " The only answer I can give you is that I do not 
consider Mrs. Tompkins of sufficient importance. I don't 
know how you will break this to her. Good-afternoon." 

It was such colossal impertinence, her sending for me instead 
of writing to me, though that would have been bad enough, 
that I was determined not to spare her. 



CHAPTER XX 

AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 

As I lived four or five years in Australia, and have written 
various books upon Australian poets, and as both my wife 
and my son are Victorians by birth, it is natural for me to 
devote a chapter to Australians in literature whom I have 
known, counting both people from the Old Country who 
became Australians by residence, and those who were born 
or educated in Australia, though their writing career has 
been in England. 

I never met either Gordon or Kendall — Adam Lindsay 
Gordon and Henry Clarence Kendall, the twin stars of 
Australian poetry, naturally come first to one's mind in 
writing of Australian literature, because poetry in Australia, 
as usual, preceded prose as an art. 

Gordon, whose nephew, Henry Ratti, living in London, 
had just placed himself in communication with me in a 
couple of long letters, and invited me to lunch when he died 
so prematurely, had been dead for nearly ten years before 
I landed in Australia. But Kendall did not die till I had 
been in Australia for nearly three years. I was in Victoria 
when he died ; I think I had actually been appointed to the 
Chair of Modern History in the University of Sydney before 
it happened, so I missed him by a very narrow margin. 
So little stir did his death cause in Victoria that I never 
even heard of it, and imagined that he had been dead for 
years, though he wrote lyrics only excelled in music by 
Shelley's, Swinburne's and Poe's in the whole of English 
literature. Yet he had visited Melbourne, and was, in 
fact, there and in the company of Gordon the very day 
before his rival died. Kendall, unlike Gordon, was Australian 
born. 

240 



AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 241 

Far the greatest author born on Austrahan soil is, of 
course, Mrs. Humphry Ward, a Tasmanian by birth, though 
Austraha had long passed out of her life before she wrote. 
" Tasma " was also a Tasmanian by birth, and " George 
Egerton," whose father, Captain Dunne, fought in the New 
Zealand war, was born in Melbourne. 

Mrs. Campbell Praed, on the other hand, was not only 
born in Queensland, the daughter of a prominent Queensland 
politician, Thomas Lodge Murray Prior, but has gone to her 
native land for the scene of her brilliant novels. Ill-health 
kept her from coming often to Addison Mansions, where she 
had a double claim to literary homage, for, apart from her 
own eminence as a novelist, she has a matrimonial con- 
nection with William Mackworth Praed, the brilliant novelist 
and father of Society Poetry. 

Rolf Boldrewood, though born in London, has been so 
long in Australia that he almost counts as a Colonial 
(Australian born) rather than a Colonist (settler). He went 
to the old Sydney College in New South Wales more than 
seventy years ago, and though he spent the greater part of 
his life as a Police Magistrate and Warden of the gold-fields 
in New South Wales, began life as one of the pioneer squatters 
of Victoria. His experiences gave him a rich equipment for 
writing tales of wild life in the old Colonial days, like Robbery 
Under Arms, with which he made such a huge reputation in 
1888. I remember him as a writer ten years before that, 
when he used to send a weekly causerie to the Australasian, 
admirably written under his famous pseudonym. I believe 
that he used to call it " Under the Greenwood Tree." He had 
already written and published the novel which he afterwards 
called The Squatter's Bream. It was a thin paper volume, 
a sort of cross between our sixpennies and the French three 
francs fifty coverless novels, and it was called in those days 
Ups and Downs. It was a true story ; it dealt with the ups 
and downs of the famous Mossgiel Station, which made 
John Simson's great fortune, and the ruin by drought of 
the De Salis brothers who had the station before him. It 
was published anonymously. Rolf Boldrewood's real name 
is Thomas Alexander Browne. His mother was a Miss 



242 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Alexander. Both the Brownes and the Alexanders were 
huge men ; Rolf's brother, Sylvester Browne, was the tallest 
man in Australia, a couple of inches taller than my uncle, 
Sir Charles (who was just under six foot six, and I think may 
have owed some of his influence in the early days to his 
great stature). The Brownes were not only very tall, but 
very strongly-built men. Their adventurousness took them 
to West Australia, where they made large fortunes during 
the mining boom. 

Guy Boothby and Louis Becke, on the other hand, both 
much younger men, were real Colonials, Becke having been 
born at Port Macquarie, New South Wales, and Boothby at 
Adelaide, where his father was a member of Parliament and 
his grandfather a Judge. That did not prevent him from 
leading the wildest life. At one time he was an explorer and 
crossed Australia from north to south. At another time he 
was stoker on a tramp steamer trading between Singapore 
and Borneo. He " struck oil " with the detective stories of 
Dr. Nikola, which the Windsor Magazine ran in opposition 
to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine, 
and at one time was making nine thousand a year out of his 
writing. I remember his chartering an eight hundred ton 
steam yacht, and he had some wonderful prize dogs at the 
Manor House, close to the Kempton Park racecourse, in 
which he lived. 

Becke was never so fortunate in his earnings, though he 
was a far superior writer. He acquired his wonderful know- 
ledge of the Australian coast and the South Sea Islands as 
supercargo of one of the schooners which trade between 
the islands and Sydney. He was one of Fisher Unwin's 
discoveries, and came very near achieving a Kidnapped 
and Treasure Island success, for which, as far as first-hand 
knowledge was concerned, he was infinitely better equipped 
than Stevenson. 

Frank Bullen, Becke's rival in South Sea knowledge, was 
not an Australian, but born in Paddington. Like Becke, he 
was in the Merchant Service. I have more to say about him 
in another chapter. 

Ada Cambridge, who was for a long time the best-known 



AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 243 

novel-writer in Australia, was born in Norfolk, and spent 
all her time in East Anglia till she married the Rev. J. F. 
Cross, and sailed with him to Australia in 1870, the year of 
Adam Lindsay Gordon's death. She published her first 
novel about seven years later. Cambridge was her maiden 
name. 

Ethel Turner, Mrs. H. R. Curlewis, is another of the few 
Australian authors living in Australia who have had large 
publics in England. As a reviewer, I hailed with delight her 
first books, Seven Little Australians and The Family at Mis- 
Rule, and prophesied the wide and continuous success which 
she has attained with her stories of child life in Australia. 
Mrs. Curlewis was born in Yorkshire, but she has lived in 
Sydney ever since I can remember. 

Frances Campbell (Mrs. Howard Douglas Campbell), the 
author of Love the Atonement, The Two Queenslanders, and 
other novels, married a cousin of the late Duke of Argyll, who 
was out in Queensland, and commenced writing at his Grace's 
suggestion. In point of fact, she came to us with a letter of 
introduction from him. Since then she has been an active 
and successful journalist, doing several special journeys 
abroad as correspondent for the great London dailies. She 
is not to be confused with Mrs. Vere Douglas Campbell, the 
mother of Marjorie Bowen, who is also a novelist. I made 
the mistake myself once. 

Mrs. Mannington Caffyn, who under the pseudonym of 
" Iota " wrote the famous A Yellow Aster, was a beautiful 
and spirited Irish girl, the daughter of a country gentleman, 
who took to hospital nursing as a profession, and married a 
doctor, whose ill-health drove him tc Australia. Her life 
there was full of hard experiences, but she did not make a 
mark in literature till her return to England. Andrew Lang 
was struck with the extraordinary ability of A Yellow 
Aster, and urged with all his influence one of the old classical 
publishing houses to bring it out, but in vain. Hutchinson 
saw his opportunity, accepted the book, advertised it with 
genius, and made a colossal success of it. Other successes 
followed, so real that she was able to send her growing boys 
to a crack public school. Another novelist not born in 



244 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Australia, but resident there for some years, was " Rita," 
who was educated in Sydney. 

The Countess von Arnim, author of a delightful series of 
books from Elizabeth and Her German Garden to Fraulein 
Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther, was an Australian born, the 
daughter of Mr. Herron Beauchamp. 

Haddon Chambers, one of my earliest literary friends in 
London, though I have seen little of him for many years, I 
met because we came from Australia at about the same time. 
He was born near Sydney, of Irish parents, and was for a 
while in the New South Wales Civil Service, like his father 
before him. Feeling, as I did, that Australia was no place 
for a literary career, he visited England when he was twenty, 
and returned to England for good when he was twenty-two, 
a handsome, alert, indomitable Australian boy. He looked 
very boyish in those days. Beginning life in England as a 
journalist and story-writer, he suddenly took London by 
storm with his play, Captain Swift. Captain Swift was 
one of the greatest parts which Beerbohm Tree has created, 
and from that time forward Chambers became one of the 
dramatists who count. 

To my mind, the best author living in Australia at the 
present moment is the Rev. William Henry Fitchett, 
President of the General Conference of the Methodist Church 
of Australia, editor of a magazine and a weekly newspaper, 
and Principal of a ladies' college in Melbourne. He made 
his name with a series of remarkable books about the exploits 
of the British army — writing at first under the pseudonym 
of " Vedette." Few men have ever written so brilliantly 
or so sympathetically on the subject as the author of Fights 
for the Flag and Deeds that Won the Empire. 

A. B. Paterson, the poet who wrote " The Man from Snowy 
River," is an Australian by birth and residence. He is 
another of the few Australian authors who have a vogue in 
England without ever having lived there. He is recognised 
not only as one of the chief poets of Australia, but as a 
publicist. He is a solicitor by profession. 

W. H. Ogilvy, the best living Australian poet, was not 
born in Australia, nor does he live there now, but he spent 



AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 245 

many years in the Australian bush, and caught its spirit 
better than any poet except Adam Lindsay Gordon. 

The Countess of Darnley, who wrote some fiction a few 
years ago, was the beauty of Melbourne when I was there 
in the 'eighties. Lord Darnley met her when he came out 
to Australia with one of the English cricket elevens. He 
was then the Hon. Ivo Bligh, a name which will never be 
forgotten in the history of sport. 

The charming and elegant Eleanor Mordaunt, author of 
Lu of the Ranges, the best novel ever written about hard- 
ships in Australia, is English by birth. 

" Lu of the Ranges,'''' says a nil admirari Australian news- 
paper, whose editor could not have known that she was born 
in England, " is a notable contribution to Australian litera- 
ture. ... It is solidly constructed, finely written, frank to 
the verge of brutality, and inherently Australian. Lu, 
pictured on the cover by the fool illustrator as a charming 
English maiden, is a drab and very human girl of the back- 
woods, who, to the end of her life, could not speak gram- 
matically. Her language is the sort that looks neater 
printed with a dash; and she has a temper of her own. A 
hard, glittering, valiant personality, whom life teaches to 
take care of herself ' on her own.' 

" A veritable child of the bush, she was inured alike to 
heat and cold, to hard work and a spare diet, to an almost 
incredible isolation. . . . For the children of the bush are, 
above all things, old, like the primitive forms of vegetation, 
the wistful-eyed, prehistoric animals which are with their 
fellows. When they grow up and find their way to the 
cities, they blossom into a splendid youth, which never again 
quite leaves them ; or else, scared and bewildered, they creep 
back again to the wild places whence they came. But to 
the irresponsible gaiety of childhood they are for ever 
strangers." 

It was the outcome of the seven years of struggles, more 
than once coming perilously near starvation, which she had 
in the colony of Victoria. Some of her short stories are good 
enough for Rudyard Kipling. That she has not assumed her 
place in the front rank of novelists is due only to the immense 



246 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

barriers to recognition which have to be surmounted owing 
to the mountains of fiction which are cast up every year, and 
stand between the new writer and fame. 

When I asked Eleanor Mordaunt about her Ufe in 
AustraHa she said — 

" In AustraUa I edited a woman's paper, and made 
gardens, and blouses for tea-room girls, and worked in an 
engineer's shop at metal work, and was four times carried 
into public hospitals for dying. I never had a penny in the 
bank — and more than once not in the world. Once I lay in 
bed for three days because I had nothing to eat. Then 
came thirty pounds for a manuscript of essays from Lothian 
of Melbourne (published 1909 under the title of Rosemary), 
and seven pounds a woman owed me for painting her a set 
of silk curtains, and two pounds for The Garden of Content- 
ment, and I got up and went out and bought a pound of 
chops, and cooked and ate them all. I did all my housework 
at night, and all the washing. 

" In Leek this time I lived on fifteen shillings a week with 
the weavers, and knew no one else except the two daughters 
of the Trade Union secretary, and never had so much love 
and kindness in my life. The book comes out next autumn, 
and is called Bellamy.'''' 

Mary Gaunt, the novelist and traveller, was born and 
brought up in Victoria. Her father was a well-known 
judge in the Colony. She had met with considerable success 
in journalism before she left the Melbourne University. 

Dr. George Ernest Morrison, who made himself so famous 
as correspondent of The Times in Peking, was, as I have said 
elsewhere, a fellow-student and friend of mine at the 
Melbourne University, and has been a great friend ever 
since. It was I who persuaded Horace Cox to publish his 
An Australian in China, the only book he has ever published, 
though I myself conveyed to him an offer of a thousand 
pounds on account for a book about China before the Allied 
Powers invaded it. He was unwilling to enter into a con- 
tract, and the matter dropped. He has since then resigned 
his position on The Times, and become English adviser to 
the Government of China. His book on China, whenever 



AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 247 

it does come, will be read all over the world, because no 
European has ever understood Chinese politics as well as 
he has. 

His knowledge of the country Chinese, the two hundred 
million toiling agricultural poor, is just as extraordinary. 
His gigantic journeys across China have given him a chance 
of seeing them as no other Anglo-Saxon, and probably no 
other white man, ever has seen them. His first journey 
was from Shanghai to Rangoon by land in 1894, which he 
accomplished at a cost of eighteen pounds, and on which 
he went unarmed, as usual. That is the journey described 
in An Australian in China. His second was from Bangkok 
in Siam to Yunnan city in China and round Tonquin in 1896 ; 
his third across Manchuria from Stretensk in Siberia to 
Vladivostok ; his fourth from Peking to the border of Ton- 
quin ; his fifth from Honan city in Central China across Asia 
to Andijan in Russian Turkestan, nearly four thousand miles. 

Morrison, whenever he came back to England from the 
East, used to come straight to Addison Mansions. One night 
he turned up about 10 p.m. 

" How long have you been in London? " I asked. 

" About two hours." 

The hero of so many striking adventures (in which most 
people would feel inclined to include the siege of Peking, 
for he was badly wounded in it, and without his leadership 
the city would have fallen) is, though his bushy hair has 
turned snow-white, singularly youthful-looking. His rounded 
clean-shaven face has not a line or a wrinkle from its long 
sojourn under Eastern suns. His blue eye has a merry 
twinkle in it which gives his face a humorous expression when 
it is not hardened for action. Those who have seen him in 
a crisis, know how stern and resolute and uncompromising 
it can be. He has a slim, active figure. 

Just before he was appointed Times correspondent in 
China, I approached Sir Henry Norman, who was at that 
time one of the editors of the Daily Chronicle, and whom 
I knew, to try and get the proprietors of that paper to give 
him a similar appointment in China, or in some country 
where Spanish is spoken, for Morrison speaks Spanish fluently. 



248 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

I enumerated all the qualifications which immediately 
afterwards led The Times to make the best appointment 
they made since De Blowitz. At the end of it Norman just 
said with a cold smile, " Oh, all your geese are swans," and 
changed the subject. I wondered if he ever let the pro- 
prietors of the Chronicle know what a goose they had lost, 
and whom they could have secured for quite a moderate 
salary. To his honour be it known, that Moberly Bell, of 
The Times, recognised Morrison's value the moment the 
young doctor approached him. 

Morrison's middle fame was of a quite unusual sort. His 
walk across Australia without money and without arms had 
been a nine days' wonder. His gallant explorations in New 
Guinea, culminating in his being brought home with a barbed 
wooden spear-head inside him, and being sent on to Edin- 
burgh because no one in Australia could extract it, made 
him a celebrity in Scotland as well as Melbourne. But 
when Prof. Chiene extracted the spear-head successfully, 
Morrison's exploits, for the time being, were lost sight of in 
those of the great surgeon, and he became known as " Chiene's 
case." 

G. W. Rusden, the only important historian of New 
Zealand and Australia till Henry Gyles Turner's book ap- 
peared, I knew very well. We lived together, until I was 
married, at Cotmandene, Punt Road, South Yarra, a suburb 
of Melbourne. In fact, I was married from there. He had 
for many years been clerk of the Parliaments in Melbourne, 
and was actually engaged in writing his histories when we 
were living together. He was a strange mixture in his 
sentiments — a violent Tory in everything except where 
natives were concerned. But he was even more violent as 
an advocate for coloured people. At that time the Maories 
were giving a good deal of trouble in New Zealand, and 
Bryce, the Minister for Native Affairs, showed great reso- 
lution and capacity in dealing with them. This infuriated 
Rusden, who, partly from the yellow journals in New Zealand, 
and partly from Sir George Grey, who had been Governor and 
afterwards Premier of the Colony, gleaned a farrago of libels, 
accusing Bryce of murdering native women and children. He 



AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 249 

showed these reports to me triumphantly. At the risk of 
losing his friendship, for he was very touchy, I begged him 
not to make any use of these materials, which appeared to 
me patently false. But he persisted in inserting portions 
of them. Years afterwards, when both he and I were living 
in England, Bryce brought an action for libel against him in 
the London Courts on these very grounds. Rusden went to 
my uncle's firm, Sladen and Wing, as his solicitors, on account 
of his friendship with my other uncle, Sir Charles. My 
cousin told me about it. " Well," I said, " make him pay 
anything to keep it out of court. I was living with him 
when he wrote that part of his history, and saw the materials, 
and he hasn't a leg to stand on." 

But Rusden was a great deal too stubborn to compromise 
— and the verdict against him was five thousand pounds 
damages. 

Turner also is an old friend of mine. He was long manager 
of the Commercial Bank in Melbourne, and was one of the 
founders and editors of the Melbourne Review. He and the 
late Alexander Sutherland, who was a schoolmaster, wrote 
the excellent book on Australian literature which has been 
the foundation of all subsequent works on the subject, 
especially in the matter of our knowledge of Adam Lindsay 
Gordon. 

And here I must mention my two closest Australian 
literary friends — Arthur Patchett Martin and Margaret 
Thomas. Margaret Thomas, who was brought up in 
Australia, though she was actually born in England, began 
life as a sculptor. She won the silver medal of the Royal 
Academy, and executed, among other public works, the 
memorial to Richard Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and 
the memorials to various Somerset celebrities in the Somerset 
Valhalla, founded by the Kinglakes at Taunton. She was 
so successful also as a portrait painter that she was able to 
retire with a competency, and devote the rest of her life 
to travel and book-writing. She has written travel-books 
on Syria, Spain and Morocco, and hand-books on painting 
and sculpture. Probably no one living has such a wide 
knowledge of the picture-galleries of the Continent. 



250 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Patchett Martin was born at Woolwich, but went to 
Australia at an early age, and was educated at the Melbourne 
Grammar School and University. He helped to found, and 
edited the Melbourne Review, and was intimately associated 
with the theatre, because his sister married Garner, the 
principal theatrical impresario of Australia. He settled in 
London in 1882, and practically introduced Adam Lindsay 
Gordon's poems to their popularity in England, where they 
had been neglected except for the reviews and articles which 
appeared in Baily's Magazine, about the time of Gordon's 
death a dozen years before. While editor of the Melbourne 
Review, Martin was among the very first to " boom " Robert 
Louis Stevenson, who was his model in his own delightful 
poems and essays. His big, burly form and hot, good- 
humoured face were very familiar in the Savage Club in the 
'eighties. 

Australian authors in London centre round the Royal 
Colonial Institute, and the British Australasian, the editor of 
which, Mr. Chomley, is the secretary of the literary circle at 
the Royal Colonial Institute, which meets on Thursday 
nights, and has most interesting papers and discussions. 

Both the former librarian (my old friend, J. R. Boos^, 
who is now the secretary) and the present, P. Evans Lewin, 
who was for a brief period the chief librarian of South 
Australia, have kept the track of nearly every book which 
has been published about Australia or by an Australian, 
and Australian authors and journalists make a regular club 
of the Institute when they are in London. 



CHAPTER XXI 

MY NOVELIST FRIENDS : PART I 

By far the greater number of my literary friends have been 
noveHsts. I have counted no less than two hundred and 
seventy male novelists who have visited us at Addison 
Mansions, and I have no doubt that I have forgotten enough 
to bring the number up to three hundred. 

Of Walter Besant, a short sturdy man, with a bushy brown 
beard and blue eyes behind spectacles, which could be 
very merry or very indignant, I have spoken elsewhere. 
Besant, who pronounced his name with the accent on the 
second syllable (it is said because people always pronounced 
the famous theosophist's name with the accent on the first 
syllable, though the recollection of its Byzantine etymology 
may also have guided him), was very outspoken. He could 
not abide the famous Annie Besant; he considered that she 
was a millstone about his brother's neck, and made no bones 
over saying so. That brother was a master at Cheltenham 
College when I first went there. But I do not remember if 
I ever saw Mrs. Besant there, though we saw the masters' 
wives as a body in the College Chapel every Sunday morning. 
Another matter on which he was outspoken was his repulsion 
for George Eliot — not her works, but her personality. He once 
said to me that her head reminded him of a horse's, and on 
another occasion said that no woman's face had ever struck 
him as more sensual. 

His own personality was splendid. He was so genial, 
though such a fighter; he was so splendidly full of energy, 
so quick to catch on to ideas, so masterful and wide-grasping 
in carrying them out; so absolutely friendly; such a good 
enemy, and so astonishingly warm-hearted. I never had a 
greater personal feeling of respect and affection for any great 
man than for Besant. 

261 



252 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

All the world knows how much he effected for authors, 
and how much he sacrificed for them. He made as large an 
income as any great novelist of his time, but he might have 
made much more and lived another twenty years, if he had 
not slaved for his brother authors. 

George Meredith, who succeeded him as head of the literary 
craft, was never at Addison Mansions, though his daughter 
came twice with Lady Palmer. I only had the privilege 
of knowing him towards the end of his life, when his time 
and his health were far too precious to be spent on going to 
at-homes, though he was very kind about having younger 
authors introduced to him at the parties which Lady Palmer 
gave in his honour when he was staying with her. Once 
seen, George Meredith could never be forgotten. You were 
delighted to find that a man who had created a literature 
within a literature, the writer who by common acclaim is 
the greatest of all English novelists, was so rare and impressive 
in his appearance and speech. His face was singularly 
beautiful in its old age, surmounted by a fleece of snow-white 
hair, and illuminated by bright blue eyes, absolutely clear. 
He was, of course, an excellent talker, and both his voice 
and his way of using it were strikingly emphatic. There 
are few old men whom I have met to whom I should so 
unhesitatingly apply the word majestic. The whole face, 
with its well-trimmed beard and unexaggerated features, 
reminded me of the bearded Zeus in the group of the three 
gods on the frieze of the Parthenon. 

He was very gracious also to young authors, though it 
must have been a severe tax on him to have so many wor- 
shippers introduced to him. For George Meredith was not 
a man like Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lady whom I intro- 
duced to him began, " It must bore you terribly. Dr. Holmes, 
to have everybody who is introduced to you telling you how 
they admire your books." 

" On the contrary, madame," he said gallantly, " I can 
never get enough of it. I am the vainest man alive." 

On the same occasion Holmes told me that he had been 
unable to do any writing (except his short Hundred Days in 
Europe) for years, because his entire time was taken up with 
answering complimentary letters. 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 253 

Hardy did come to 32 Addison Mansions, Hardy who 
has received the Order of Merit, and is proposed for next 
year's Nobel prize for Uterature, as the head of the literary 
craft, one of the great masters of English fiction. I am very 
proud to have known Thomas Hardy ; he is not only so great, 
but so silent and reserved, that it is not easy to know him. 
I have met him often, but seldom seen him talking, except 
very quietly to an intimate friend. He has generally been 
on the edge of a crowd, observing — we have the fruits of that 
profound observation in his novels. That slight figure, 
that melancholy face, with the watchful eyes, was always 
a cynosure, for Hardy has been the object of unbounded 
admiration for many years. I remember his being the bright 
particular star about whom the late Lady Portsmouth was 
always talking at her house-parties at Eggesford, where I 
stayed, as far back as 1885. 

I have a letter from him which is one of my most treasured 
literary possessions. He wrote it to me to explain his point 
in introducing the passage about the slaughtered pig after 
I had reviewed Jude, the Obscure, at considerable length and 
with minute criticism in the Queen. I have alluded to his 
almost equal eminence as a poet in another chapter. 

It is natural to couple Hall Caine with Thomas Hardy, for 
both of them were brought up as architects, though they 
turned to literature, and reached the topmost rung. 

Hall Caine has been an intimate friend of mine for many 
years. Our friendship began before he was a novelist, in 
the days when he was a critic of the Athenceum and the 
Academy, and an editor of poetry. His sending me The 
Sonnets of Three Centuries in the year in which he lost 
his housemate, the poet and artist, Dante Rossetti, was the 
beginning of our friendship. He began publishing novels in 
1885, and two years later leapt into the front rank of novelists 
with his magnificent Deemster. 

After my return from America I began to see more and 
more of him. He became a director of the Authors' Club, 
of which I was Honorary Secretary, and one of the chief 
speakers at the New Vagabonds Club. 

In 1894 he reached, with The Manxman, the height of fame, 
at which he has since continued. I prophesied its enormous 



254 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

success in a long review of it, which I wrote for the Queen, 
which came out simultaneously with the publication of the 
book. We were in Rome together at the time that he was 
writing the Eternal City, and in Egypt together while he was 
writing The White Prophet. 

No one could be in the presence of Hall Caine for five 
minutes without knowing that he was in the presence of a 
remarkable man. His resemblance to Shakespeare is extra- 
ordinary, not only in the dome-like expanse of his forehead 
and the Elizabethan slope of his beard, but in the burning 
eyes and the shape of the eyecups. He looks the genius 
that he is. 

Hall Caine has always had the merit of being highly 
approachable and affectionate, and if his conversation is 
apt to centre round the work he is doing, it is always most 
interesting and pregnant. 

At Rome, for instance, where I very often had lunch with 
him in his flat at Trinita del Monte, overlooking the city, 
and went for walks with him, he was very full of the Vatican, 
where he constantly went to see certain cardinals, who were 
most indiscreet in their confidences. 

He was intimate with the Italian Government, too. I 
met various members of the Cabinet at his table, and one of 
them, Ferraris, then Postmaster-General, as well as editor 
of the Antologia Nuova, has done me many acts of friendship 
since. 

Jerome's neighbour in those days, Joseph Hatton (than 
whom there could have been no more striking contrast to 
him), was one of his and my dearest friends. There were 
few men so dear to their friends as Joe Hatton. He had an 
enormous circle of them in literature, and on the stage, and 
so won their hearts with his geniality and loyalty that they 
forgot how eminent he was, and treated him as a brother. 
But Joe Hatton, in addition to the vast amount of work he 
did as editor and critic, wrote some of the best novels of his 
day. I can see him now as he so often came to our house, 
a rather small man with a brown beard, a lift of the chin, 
a ready smile, and such very bright sympathetic brown eyes. 
He used to bring his pretty little daughter with him before 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 255 

she was grown up. How proud he was of her first successes 
on the stage, and the fairy-book she wrote ! He had a house 
with a very nice garden in St. John's Wood, where he gave 
parties at which one met all the leading actors and actresses 
of the day. They could always spare time for a reception 
at Hatton's, as actors always stopped for a word with him 
at the Garrick Club on Saturday nights. 

Of Doyle, Kipling and Barrie, Anthony Hope and Frank- 
fort Moore, I have spoken in another chapter. 

Stanley Weyman was such a rare visitor to London that 
he was not often at our house. But I have corresponded 
with him a good deal. I knew when I made A Gentleman of 
France my book of the week in To-day, and hailed the author 
as an historical novelist of the first rank, on what a solid basis 
his work rested, for we were at Oxford at the same time, 
and he took his First in History almost in the same term as 
I took mine. He is a very fair man, with an eyeglass, much 
more like a soldier than an author. 

Poor Crockett, a big tall man, with a fair beard, the type 
of the Saxons who fought against the Conqueror at Hastings, 
was not very often in London, but when he was there, he 
was a conspicuous figure at our at-homes. We had many 
tastes in common, including Italy. Crockett asked my 
advice when the question arose of his giving up the ministry. 
He was at that time Free Church minister of Penicuik, a 
little place in Midlothian, with a salary, as far as I remember, 
of a hundred or two a year, but as an author was making 
a thousand or two a year, and able to earn a good deal more 
if he could save the time which he had to devote to his clerical 
work. His congregation were aghast at the idea of losing 
their beloved minister just as he had sprung into Anglo- 
Saxon fame, and, with Scottish casuistry, represented to 
him that it would be wrong for him to neglect the work 
of the Lord for any worldly object. Crockett thought, and I 
agreed with him, and decided him, that he would be more 
certain of doing good if he allowed some man to whom the 
minister's stipend was necessary to be minister of Penicuik, 
while he did his teaching and his preaching with his pen. 
F. W. Robinson's short, thick-set figure, and heavy mous- 



256 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

tache, were as conspicuous. It is strange how soon poor 
Robinson has been forgotten. His work was popular with 
readers, and treated with respect by critics, and he was one 
of the bigwigs at literary clubs and receptions, but with his 
death all memory of him seemed to pass away, except among 
his old friends. 

G. A. Henty, on the other hand, though he has been dead 
for years now, seems to stand before us still, with his great 
beard, his great pipe, his great body, and his breezy person- 
ality. Henty loved clubs and literary gatherings. The 
Savage was his particular stronghold, when he had said 
good-bye to war-correspondenting in distant lands. He was 
the typical chairman there, with his Father Christmas beard, 
and his volumes of smoke, and his bluff personality. He 
had been as popular among his fellow-correspondents. Was 
it not Henty who lost his only pair of boots, when the British 
army marched into some capital (I think it was King Theo- 
dore's in Abyssinia), and took his place in the triumph in 
carpet slippers, riding on a pony ? 

Henty' s work as a war-correspondent gave him the copy 
for those wonderful books which made him the boys' Dumas. 
He was a great personality, and, as I saw, on the only two 
occasions when I ran across him in a crisis, a born ruler of 
men. 

He often came across from his house on Clapham Common 
to our at-homes, and looked like a strayed Viking, or a master- 
mariner, among the other authors and authoresses. Sailing 
was his hobby. 

Speaking of Abyssinia, it is natural to me to mention 
Prince Alamayu — ^Ali, as we used to call him. He was sent 
to Cheltenham College, so that he might live in the house of 
Jex-Blake, then Principal of Cheltenham, and afterwards 
head master of Rugby and Dean of Wells. Of all the head 
masters of his time, Jex-Blake had the most considerable 
reputation as a courtier and a man of the world. Alamayu 
was brought to England after the capture of Magdala, and 
came to Cheltenham in 1872, when he was eleven years old. 
He was just a royal savage when he came to Cheltenham; 
if he was hot, he took his coat off and threw it on the ground, 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 257 

and left it. He had no tutor to go about with him; he just 
mixed with the boys in the ordinary way. And at first he 
had the cruelties of his bringing up; he once, for instance, 
pushed a small boy into the water to see the splash he would 
make. But he soon got cured of this, for Jex-Blake wisely 
left him to fight his own battles, and though a sense of chivalry 
made the boys very indulgent to the poor little orphaned 
black, they soon let him know that bullying was not to be 
one of his privileges, though almost anything else was treated 
as a joke. 

When Jex-Blake went to Rugby, Alamayu went with him, 
and thence, when he was eighteen, he went to Sandhurst to 
qualify for the British Army. That was fatal. He was his 
own master there, with no one to make him take care of his 
health, or restrain himself in taking spirits. He soon con- 
tracted some deadly disease — pneumonia, I think — and died. 
Queen Victoria showed her regret by having him buried in 
St. George's Chapel at Windsor. 

I knew him very well, because I was in the head form 
when he came to the school, and was often at Jex-Blake's 
house, and was asked by " Jex " to keep an eye on him. 
He was a nice little boy, with a very affectionate disposition, 
and not at all stupid. It was his misfortune to lose at a 
critical moment of his life the firm and tactful hand which 
had disciplined and protected him for seven years. 

Green Chartreuse is almost as deadly as aeroplanes. I 
knew a man, a very well-known man, who went mad because 
he drank thirty-six green Chartreuses in one day. 

It is natural to mention George Manville Fenn in the 
same breath as Henty. He was another old friend of mine, 
and of all the men I have known, retained his youth the 
longest. Fenn's hair remained golden and undiminished in 
its vigour, and his figure remained slim and upright till he 
was nearly seventy. He lived at the beautiful old red-brick 
house on the river at Isleworth, which stands at the gates 
of the Duke of Northumberland's park, and is known as 
Syon Lodge. There he turned out those wonderful boys' 
romances of his in a steady stream. Like Henty, I met him 
constantly at the Savage and Vagabond Clubs, and at my 



258 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

own flat. He was very fond of meeting his fellow-craftsmen. 
His son, Fred Fenn, used to come too. At that time he was 
sub-editor of the Graphic, and I think he afterwards became 
first editor of the Golden Penny. In any case, he freed himself 
from the fetters of journalism by writing Amasis, that 
admirable Egyptian comic opera, in which Ruth Vincent 
won all hearts. He not only had the cleverness to write 
it, but formed the company which put it on, and stood an 
action at law about it triumphantly — a rare instance of grit. 

Richard Jefferies never came to see me at Addison Mansions ; 
he was dead, I think, before we went there. But I have a 
long and pathetic letter which he wrote to me some time 
before he died, setting forth the cross-fire of diseases from 
which he was suffering, and asking me if I thought the 
climate of the exquisite Blue Mountains of New South Wales 
would afford him any relief. One can picture how the genius 
of Jefferies would have blossomed forth amid that matchless 
gorge scenery (where you hear the bell-birds calling) and 
amid the natural history curiosities of a new land. 

Grant Allen, who lived in a charming house in the Hasle- 
mere district, was a constant visitor to our flat. We had 
visited his people in Canada before we met him. His 
father was the principal inhabitant at Kingston, Ontario, 
the dear old-fashioned town which contains Canada's Military 
Academy. The old Allen had a fine house with a delightful 
garden, right on Lake Ontario. Grant Allen was a remark- 
able-looking man, with his long red beard, and keen, hawk- 
like face. He always reminded me of the gaunt, red-bearded 
faces one sees on knights and lovers in the great French 
tapestries of the fifteenth century. And he had the same 
spare figure as they have, and the same habit of arching his 
back. He was a remarkable man, who, famous as he was, 
never got his due as a writer. He was never an F.R.S., 
though half the Fellows of the Royal Society were his inferiors 
in scientific attainments, and he never reached eminence as 
a novelist, though he wrote some amazingly clever and 
powerful books. He had a great contempt for actresses on 
account of their want of conversation. He said they could 
not talk about anything but the stage. I once came away 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 259 

with him from a party at H. D. Traill's, where he had taken 
down to supper a woman who was beyond dispute the 
greatest actress of her time. He was complaining loudly 
about it; he said that he thought she was the most stupid 
woman he had ever met. 

But he was happy in his friendships. His brother-in-law, 
Franklin Richards, father of the publisher, Grant Richards, 
was recognised as one of the soundest philosophers of his 
day at Oxford — I say this though his lectures were entirely 
thrown away on me. I had to attend them because he was 
a don of my College, but Philosophy was Chinese to me. 

One of Grant Allen's greatest friends in the last part of 
his life was Richard le Gallienne, who went to live in that 
house in the wood beyond Haslemere to be near him. Le 
Gallienne had a sort of summer-house in the wood, a long 
way from the house, in which he wrote those charming poems, 
secure from interruption. I often went to see him in the 
days when he lived in the King's Farm at Brentford, which 
was not a very farm-like house. But I only once went to 
see him at Haslemere, and on that occasion I found him at 
the summer-house, dressed as carefully as if he had been in 
town, but with an eye on country effects. He had on a black 
velvet coat and waistcoat, and a rich black evening tie, but 
immaculate white flannel trousers; and I must admit that 
even in this costume he managed to look appropriate. 

When we were living at Cherwell Lodge, Oxford, that 
delightful marine villa across the Cherwell from the Gothic 
part of Magdalen, Grant Allen brought his best friend to 
see us, Edward Clodd, the secretary of the London Joint 
Stock Bank, who, in the intervals of a business career, had 
written a number of great books, beginning with The Childhood 
of the World. 

W. D. Howells only came once to see us at Addison 
Mansions, but I saw more of him when I was living in New 
York, when he used to come in at tea-time to that little hall- 
room we had for a sitting-room in that boarding-house in 
West Forty-second Street. It gave me pleasure to see him 
under my own roof, because I remembered how eagerly I 
bought and read his novels when I was at Oxford, and David 



260 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Douglas was bringing out A Chance Acquaintance, Their 
Wedding Journey, and so on, in the dainty little shilling paper 
volumes which were the fortunate precursors of the modern 
sevenpenny. Howells was rather a stout, bull-necked man, 
very capable-looking, and in those days had a thick mop 
of grey hair. In after years we knew his Italian books, 
written while he was a Consul in Italy, almost by heart. 
They are photographic in their fidelity. 

George W. Cable was another American who came to the 
flat but once. Like Howells, he seldom honoured England 
with a visit. His books, and John Burroughs', too, I first 
knew in the little David Douglas Library, and I well remem- 
ber reading his Old Creole Days all night, because I was so 
fascinated with it. 

I was staying at the house of my sister's father-in-law, the 
Court Lodge at Yalding, at the time, and the month was 
June — I had just come down from Oxford. At some im- 
possibly early hour — midnight seemed only just to have 
slipped past— the dawn streamed in, and made me blow my 
candle out, and the birds began their comment on the peach 
garden. Five-and-thirty or forty years have passed since 
then, but the delight of Cable's poetical touch remains still 
in my memory. Cable always rather reminded me of Hardy, 
though being a Southerner from New Orleans he is darker 
skinned. When he wrote Old Creole Days, he was the idol 
of the South, but later, when he took up the colour question 
on the other side, he would have been torn to pieces by the 
mob of New Orleans if they had got hold of him, so he took 
up his residence in Massachusetts. 

I always slept in the haunted room in that house, a very 
old house, with a kitchen and vaulted cellars going back to 
the time of Edward III. It contained a very large cupboard, 
between the old-fashioned chimney-piece and the window, 
in which somebody is supposed to have been bludgeoned to 
death, the corpse afterwards being dragged across the floor, 
and when the window had been thrown up with a bang, 
flung on the flags below. At one particular season of the 
year, the noises which indicate this procedure plainly have 
been heard by various people. I have forgotten when it 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 261 

happened, but it must have been a very long time ago, for 
everything to have been done so openly. 

I have slept in that room repeatedly, alone, and never 
heard the noises or thought about it being haunted, but I 
should not like to sleep in the kitchen, for it was only separated 
by a moth-eaten sort of door from the wickedest-looking 
cellars I ever remember, which, unless something has been 
done to them since then, lose themselves in pitch-dark 
spaces. 

Another author, whose delightful essays on nature used 
to be brought out in those dear little volumes of David 
Douglas's, and whom I read with even more enthusiasm 
in those days, was John Burroughs, whom I visited in his 
home at West Park, on a broad reach of the Hudson, He 
told me that he wrote most of those essays when he was a 
clerk in the Treasury at Washington, where his duties were 
to sit opposite the safes, and see that no improper person 
had access to them. I have forgotten what safes, but I 
suppose they were those which contained the United States 
gold reserve. He used to project the scenes in Wake Robin 
and Pepacton on the blank doors of the safes in his mind, 
as the cinema projects dissolving views on the lecturer's 
sheet. The sedentariness of this pursuit gave him acute 
indigestion, and he was advised that nothing but manual 
labour and a vegetable diet would cure it. When I was 
with him, I think he lived entirely on asparagus, lentils 
and onions. He could eat about three pounds of asparagus 
at a sitting, as I suppose other people could if they weren't 
going to have any meat or pudding. He told me one thing 
which filled my soul with joy. As manual labour was part 
of the cure, he started a vineyard, in a position chosen with 
great care, on a steep sloping bank of the Hudson facing due 
south. His grapes ripened here three or four weeks before 
any one else's, with the result that he got a hundred pounds 
a ton for them instead of four pounds. Bravo, literature ! 

Henry James, in virtue of his long sojourn among us, belongs 
to England almost as much as he does to America. He still 
lives in London in the winter, but in the warm part of the 
year he retires to a delightful Georgian house on the crest 



262 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

of the hill at Rye, one of the most old-world places in England. 
Henry James's house and garden are exactly what you would 
choose for him — the most refined and dignified and subtle 
novelist in the language. The house is called " Lamb's 
House," but it has nothing to do with Charles Lamb, though 
it is exactly the house which he would have chosen, when 
fortune came to him. All the garden is adorable, but especi- 
ally the Dutch court behind the house, and the kitchen-garden, 
surrounded by the most ancient cottages in Rye, with roofs 
red and chimneys bewitched. Between the garden and the 
kitchen-garden is a red-brick Georgian pavilion, facing the 
top of the street, as the Tempietto faces the long sloping lane 
which leads up to the Sculpture Gallery of the Vatican, and 
it is not less beautiful than the Tempietto. 

Everything is appropriate; the novelist even bought the 
cottages at the back of the kitchen-garden, to prevent them 
being rebuilt, and thus ensured the permanence of a perfect 
setting. He has a singularly noble head and face, the type 
one would like to imagine for a Cicero. 

Richard Whiteing, who leapt into fame at a comparatively 
late age, with No. 5, John Street, after having been one 
of the most important newspaper writers in England for 
many years, is another man whom you would pick out in 
any crowd for his splendid head. 

Sir Gilbert Parker, who was a regular habitue of our at- 
homes before he went into Parliament and became such an 
overworked man, was in those days a slim, black-bearded 
Colonial, with noticeable blue eyes. He was born in Canada, 
the son of a British officer stationed out there, and knew 
Australia as well as Canada — in fact, I met him because we 
had both been in Australia. He was at that time a busy 
journalist and in the first flush of his success as a novelist, 
and no one could have deserved it better, for his novels had 
the historical fidelity and felicity of Francis Parkman, in 
addition to their graceful and romantic style. In spite of 
the solid work he has done in politics, he will be remembered 
as an author more than as a politician, though now we clap 
him on the back for the splendid spade-work he does for the 
Conservative Party. As a writer he fires the imagination, 
like the bugles in his famous story. 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 263 

Henniker-Heaton, on the other hand, will be remembered 
not for his biographical dictionary of Australians, which was 
the precursor of Who's Who, but for his achievement in politics 
— a postal reform as far reaching as that of Rowland Hill, 
the father of the post-office. I prophesied his success in print 
nearly thirty years ago. He is a shining example of what 
a man who has a great ideal can do by singleness of vision ; 
nothing could shake him from his ideal of a universal penny 
post ; ridicule was poured on it ; the big battalions were brought 
up against it ; but he pursued it doggedly. He showed infinite 
patience, infinite good-nature, infinite tact. He brought his 
personal influence to bear on politicians of both sides. He 
went to conferences all over the world; he entertained 
delegates from all parts of the world ; he collected and classified 
every species of statistic; he accumulated irresistible facts 
until he had a penny postage, not universal, because it does 
not bridge the twenty miles between Kent and France,^ but 
universal for the possessions of the Anglo-Saxon nations, for 
the United States came into the agreement as well as the 
Empire. Nor did his activities stop at the post-office; for 
he has achieved reforms of almost equal magnitude in tele- 
graphic charges. Now he is taking a well-deserved rest, and 
I cannot help thinking that he would take it very usefully 
if he had a flat in Berlin, and saw the Kaiser every day. A 
monarch of the force and intelligence of the Kaiser could not 
help seeing the irresistibleness of the argument that a letter 
ought to be taken from London to Hamburg and Berlin for 
the same price as it is taken to the heart of British Borneo, 
and if he once happened to notice it, he would brush away 
the cobwebs which impede it. 

To Alfred Austin I was never attracted, except by his 
enthusiasm for gardens and Italy. He was made Laureate 
because he was a leader writer, not because he was a poet, 
and possessed neither the ability nor the affability for the 
post. Had he gone on writing about blackthorn and black- 
birds, he would have left a greater name as a poet, and would 
not have been made the victim of the famous story which is 
told of a Scottish law lord, who, meeting him at a country 
house, said, " Well, Mr. Austin, are you still writing ' pomes ' ?" 
^ Now happily soon to be accomplished. 



264 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

" One must do something to keep the wolf from the door," 
repHed the poet, with official modesty. 

" And is that what you use those ' pomes ' for? " asked 
the man of law, giving one visions of a small man with a 
big moustache belabouring a wolf on the door-step with a 
roll of manuscript. 

I know of only one more malicious story, which relates to 
the bestowal of a bishopric. While it was in the balance, 
Lord Salisbury was suffering from one of his fits of insomnia, 
and, as his custom was, sent for an M.P. son, whose speeches 
were the only thing which could make him sleep. His son 
bothered him all night to bestow the see — it was the premier 
bishopric — on its present holder. At last Lord Salisbury 
lost patience. " Oh ! give it to him, and leave me. I 
prefer insomnia." 

It was a propos of insomnia that Lord Salisbury made his 
finest retort in the House of Lords. A new Liberal peer, to 
whom the leader was particularly acid, because, having been 
a whip in the House of Commons, he was rather conscious of 
his importance, was, in spite of the fact that his income arose 
chiefly from a brewery, advocating Local Option, because he 
said that the number of public-houses was a temptation to 
drink. " Of course," said Lord Salisbury, " I do not enjoy 
the same opportunities as the noble Lord does for knowing 
the effect of the number of public-houses upon the amount 
which is drunk, but I don't see his line of argument, because, 
though I live in a house with forty bedrooms, I never feel 
the slightest inclination to sleep." 

The Irish Party, too, came in for his acid wit. Who has 
forgotten his comment on the member of the Irish Party 
who libelled him, and went to America, when he lost the action, 
to escape paying the costs? Lord Salisbury only shrugged 
his shoulders, and said that escaping was the forte of the 
Irish, adding, " Some prefer the fire-escape, and some the 
water-escape." 

Harold Frederic owed some of his vogue as a novelist in 
this country to Mr, Gladstone, who had an immense enthusiasm 
for his great novel. In the Valley. Frederic, a big burly man, 
with a burly moustache, was the ablest American journalist 
in London, till the advent of Isaac Nelson Ford for the 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 265 

Tribune, and Harry Chamberlain for the Sun and the Laffan 
Agency. Frederic represented the New York Times. He 
was a man coarse in his speech, and rather coarse in his fibre, 
and full of prejudices, but he had the gift of political pro- 
phecy, and, like Balaam, his utterances were dictated by 
the voice within him, and not by what he had come to say. 
His letters to his paper were splendid journalism. He used 
often to come to Addison Mansions, because he lived just 
round the corner in the old house on Brook Green. He 
might have been with us now, if he had not been a Christian 
Scientist. He was an enormous consumer of alcohol, though 
I never knew him the worse for liquor, and when he was 
taken with his last illness, the professor of Christian Science, 
who was called in by a woman who had great influence over 
him, was not able to insist upon banishing spirits as a regular 
practitioner would have done. The result was that he took 
stimulants (which were worse than poison to him) whenever 
he felt bad, and ruined his chance of recovery. 

Rider Haggard I have spoken of elsewhere. 

Frank Hopkinson Smith is a man I should have liked to 
see more of at Addison Mansions ; he was one of the men I 
liked best among my friends in American literary clubs. 
He was an engineer by profession, who had carried out many 
important contracts. Writing, though he was one of the 
best writers in America, was an afterthought with him. 
Like Du Maurier, that delightful man and delightful writer, 
he stumbled upon his most brilliant gift. 

Du Maurier became a novelist because he had become such 
a master of situation and polished dialogue in his pictures 
and their titles. Frank Hopkinson Smith grew to be a 
novelist out of the anecdotes which he told so brilliantly at 
story-tellers' nights at the Century Club. He had a fund of 
stories about the Italian labour which he employed in con- 
tracts. He always used to declare that engaging Italian 
labour was as simple as Kodaking, which had for its motto, 
" You press a button — we do the rest." He said that no 
matter how many men he needed, all he had to do was to 
ring up an Italian boss the night before, and tell him that he 
wanted so many men for a certain kind of job. Then they 
would be at any station in the city at seven o'clock the next 



266 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

morning, with the proper tools. He added that he always 
put a clause into the contract that if any of them murdered 
each other, the number was to be made up at once. 

" That is their weakness," he said, " but they only practice 
it on each other. It's the only kind of labour I would under- 
take a contract with. They're better than the Irish, anyway." 

"I don't agree with you," said Vermont, the sculptor; 
" they're so cruel." 

" Cruel ! " retorted Hopkinson Smith. " What price this? 
An Irishman named Larkin hired an organ-monkey from 
an old Dago for a dollar a day. The monkey was often 
badly bruised when he came back at night, and looked 
frightened to death when Larkin came to fetch him in the 
morning. So one Saint's day when the old Dago had a 
holiday, he determined to follow them up and watch them. 
The Irishman drove along till he came to the bridge over the 
railway at the bottom of Twelfth Avenue, where the coal 
carts all pass on their way up from the depot. Then he took 
the monkey out of the cart, and tied him to a post ten or 
twenty yards away from the bridge, but in full sight of it. 
Then he drove his horse and cart to a convenient place a little 
way off, and awaited events. 

" Presently the coal carts began to stream across the 
bridge, and the monkey in terror ran up to the top of the 
post. The whole way across every carter took cock-shots 
at it with pieces of coal. Occasionally one hit it, and then 
the monkey screamed with rage and pain. As soon as there 
was a cart load of coal lying at the foot of the post, Larkin 
brought up his horse and cart and shovelled them in, first 
putting the monkey where he could not be seen, to show that 
the sport was over for the present. When he was loaded up, 
he hitched the monkey to the cart again, and drove into New 
York to the retailer who bought the coal from him. 

" But the next morning, when he came for the monkey, 
he found not only that monkey, but every monkey in the organ- 
grinders' quarter, gone, and when he got down to the bridge, 
the place was looking like a zoo." 

Suddenly the popular anecdote-teller wrote Colonel Carter of 
Cartersville, one of the best American novels of its generation. 

William de Morgan, the other novelist who achieved his 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 267 

first book success so late in life, was never at Addison Mansions, 
but I had the honour of meeting him at a much more inter- 
esting place — the little atelier, somewhere in the Kilburn 
district, where he made the famous lustre tiles by which he 
was known before he took to literature. George Joy, the 
artist who painted the famous picture of Gordon meeting 
his death at Khartum, took me to see De Morgan, knowing 
how enthusiastic I was over the famous Mazzara Vase, and 
the other pieces preserved in Sicily of the old Sicilian Arab 
lustre ware. 

Of Bret Harte and Maarten Maartens I have spoken 
elsewhere. 

Egerton Castle, whose Young April is the most delightful 
book of the romantic school, in which Anthony Hope, Henry 
Harland, and a few others have written with such charm, 
was a rare visitor. Any one could see that he had been a 
soldier. But the militariness of his active, upright figure is 
no doubt partly due to the fact that he is one of the finest 
fencers in the country. He has been a representative of 
England in the international contests. He is likewise, as 
his books show, a notable connoisseur, and he has ample 
means to indulge his tastes, not only from the wide popularity 
of the novels which he writes, mostly in collaboration with 
his wife, but from his having owned one of the chief daily 
newspapers, the Liverpool Mercury, which is now amal- 
gamated with the Liverpool Post. The Agnes Castle who 
collaborates with him is, of course, his wife, not his sister. 

Percy White was a constant visitor. He has been my 
intimate friend since he published his first novel, Mr. Bailey 
Martin, that merciless dissection of suburban snobbery. I 
used to write for him when he edited Public Opinion, and 
that was a long time ago. He was one of the handsomest 
men in literature, with his merry, boyish face, dark eyes, 
and bright golden hair. C. B. Fry, the greatest all-round 
athlete in the records of sport, is his nephew, and, though 
darker, reminds me very much of Percy White as he was. 
Florence White, who paints portraits, is his sister. 

Percy White's books have never met with the circulation 
they deserve. If he had been born an American, they might 
have had the largest circulation in the world. He is just the 



268 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

writer whose circulation would have spread like wildfire, if 
he had lived in America, and written of American social life 
as he has written of ours. No one could have expressed the 
good and the bad in the American character with the same 
light touch and ruthless penetration. His is just the pen to 
depict the iron courage and the insight of genius which, 
with or without chicanery, lead to the amassing of millions — 
the selfishness, made endurable by grit and personal charm, 
of the American woman — the brilliant wit and pathetic lack 
of humour in Americans as a nation — the business side of 
sport. 

Once upon a time I introduced him to a man whom I will 
call the Vidler, who ran a newspaper, and never paid anybody 
anything except by advertisements in that paper. He 
made periodical business journeys, collecting advertisements 
for his paper— my heart bled for the advertisers — and 
used to engage an editor to look after his paper while he was 
away. He chose Percy White for the honour on this occasion, 
and asked me if I could bring them together. I gave White his 
message, warning him that he would only be paid in promises, 
and was surprised to hear that he was willing to discuss the 
matter with the Vidler. The Vidler gave him a wonderful 
dinner at the Carlton, probably not paid for yet, and then 
took him back to his chambers to discuss the matter in hand. 
White sat up with him nearly all night, gravely taking down 
notes of his projects for the paper, but reserved his decision, 
which resulted in a negative. I met him the next day, and 
asked him how he had got on, and when I heard how late he 
had been kept, apologised for all the trouble to which I had 
put him, knowing how little chance there was of his getting 
any pecuniary advantage out of it. 

" Don't apologise, my dear Douglas," he said; " I got a 
Avhole book out of him. He's the finest study I ever met in 
my life." 

As Percy White did not take up the appointment, I set 
myself to find a man who was willing to take the post, and 
would not suffer for it. I found a man who was as sharp a 
diamond as the Vidler himself. He was duly engaged, and 
I always wondered which did the other in the eye. I have 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 269 

my suspicions, because when I met the Vidler a year or two 
afterwards at Monte Carlo, he did not allude to the finish. 

George Gissing did not come often, though we had the 
great link of both knowing and loving the Ionian Sea. 

If Gissing had not died, and there was no reason why he 
should have died if he had taken ordinary care of himself— 
he would only be fifty-six if he were alive now — he would 
have had a reputation like Barrie or Bernard Shaw by this 
time, for even during his lifetime people were just beginning 
to wake up to the extraordinary qualities of his writing. I 
am not comparing him to either of those two; I only make 
the comparison because everything pointed to his having 
popularity. Every now and then some excellent writer 
achieves popularity. No one knows why. His excellence 
is against his having a wide public, and it is very seldom 
possible to tell why one is taken and another left. As the 
Bible proverb says, " Two women shall be grinding at the 
mill; one shall be taken and the other left." 

Gissing had a genius for imparting romance to the sordid. 

W. J. Locke often came in those days. He was secretary 
to the Royal Institute of British Architects, and combined 
with it the post of literary adviser to John Lane, the publisher 
— a collaboration which resulted in the publication of many 
notable books, of which none were more eventually successful 
than his own, except, I suppose, H. G. Wells's, and I think 
that it was he who advised Lane to bring out the works of 
Wells, and Harland's The Cardinal's Snuff-box, and Kenneth 
Grahame's Golden Age. 

Locke was always one of the most distinguished-looking 
persons in a room, with his tall, slight figure, very well dressed, 
and his hair — golden, with a natural wave in it — beautifully 
valeted. His theatrical successes did not begin till much 
later, nor had he developed his powers as a public speaker. 
He jmblished admirable and solidly successful books before 
he took the reading world by storm with The Beloved Vaga- 
bond, and his novels won the respect of his fellow-craftsmen 
from the first. In those days he lived in a modest flat at 
Chelsea, and was a pretty regular attendant at literary clubs 
and receptions 



270 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Coulson Kernahan was one of the most prominent figures 
in the set, because he had both a brilUant personahty, and 
was producing a remarkable series of books, beginning with 
A Dead Man's Diary. Coulson is one of our oldest and 
most intimate literary friends. I met him again directly I came 
back from America. He was at that time literary adviser 
to Ward, Lock & Co. 

When James Bowden split from his partners, Ward, Lock & 
Co., and started a publishing business of his own, Kernahan 
went with him, and continued his profoundly imaginative 
series with books about Heaven — long, thin volumes, longer 
and thinner even than the John Oliver Hobbes booklets, 
which Fisher Unwin was bringing out. They sold by the 
hundred thousand. They were the literary topic of the day, 
till Norma Lorrimer in despair said, " Kernahan is growing 
too chummy with his Creator." 

In another line his imagination produced Captain Shannon, 
a mysterious and thrilling adventure book. But he was 
soon to find his metier, and leave thrilling fiction to Mrs. 
Kernahan. He became a lecturer, for which his brilliant 
personality, his eloquence, his gift of humour, and his con- 
viction, had cut him out. He went to live in the country; 
he lectured; he became an officer in the Territorials. And 
now he has turned them all to account in the service of the 
Empire, to which he is so passionately devoted, by going 
round as a caravan-lecturer to make the youth of the country 
awake to the national peril from unpreparedness. 

At a National Defence meeting, last summer, at which 
Kernahan was the chief speaker, with Rudyard Kipling in 
the chair, Kernahan told his audience of his last good-bye 
word with Captain Robert Soott. 

The hero of the South Pole asked him what he was doing, 
and whether he had any new book on the stocks. 

" No," was the reply ; " I am neglecting my scribbling to 
work for Lord Roberts and National Defence." 

" Good I " said Scott, with unwonted warmth and en- 
thusiasm. " Good ! I'm with you there ! " 

Speaking of Lord Roberts, the grand old soldier is very 
appreciative of the work Kernahan is doing in this direction. 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 271 

The veteran Field Marshal not only wrote a eulogistic intro- 
duction to the Territorial author's book on soldiering, but 
when the latter has been addressing great audiences on 
National Defence, has on several occasions sent telegrams 
to the chairman, asking that his thanks be conveyed to the 
speaker, and warmly commending Kernahan's patriotism 
and the work he is doing for his country. Kernahan is almost 
as widely known for his friendships as for his writings. He 
has known intimately many distinguished men and women — 
authors, actors, soldiers, artists, explorers and politicians. 
On the walls of his library are many signed and inscribed 
portraits of celebrities, as well as pictures inscribed to him 
by the painters. On his shelves are numerous books dedicated 
or inscribed to him by the writers. One takes up a volume 
of Swinburne and finds written in it, " To Coulson Kernahan, 
whom Swinburne dearly loved, and who as dearly loved him. 
From his old and affectionate friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton." 

Another bears the inscription, " With the kind regards of 
Arthur James Balfour." Yet another, " To Coulson Kernahan, 
from his old chum, Jerome K. Jerome." 

He is famous too, or I should say infamous, as " infamous " 
is the only word to apply to it, for the illegibility of his hand- 
writing. His friend Harry de Windt, brother of the Ranee 
of Sarawak, tells a good story of this. It is to the effect 
that Kernahan once received a letter which ran as follows — 

" Dear Kernahan, — Many thanks for your letter. The parts 
we could make out are splendid. We are using the rest as 
a railway pass. No one can read enough of it to say that 
it isn't a railway pass, and as life is too short for any one to 
find out what it really says, the collector has in the end to 
let us through." 

Of Horace Annesley Vachell, one of those whom the gods 
love, well born, more than usually prepossessing in appearance 
and disposition, a sportsman, and one of the best novelists 
of the day, I saw a good deal when he first came back from 
California, and brought me a letter of introduction, asking 
me to help him to meet the literary people in London. I 
was immensely attracted to him, as attracted to him as I 
was to his books, for which ho had a good foundation in the 



272 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

variety of life which he had led. He started with Harrow 
and the Rifle Brigade, and had been many things, from a 
rancher in California to an artist, before he found his vocation 
in literature. The Hill, his famous Harrow school novel, 
increased his popularity wonderfully, but he was an admirable 
writer from the first, both in story and style. I have heard 
it stated that on one of his great books his publishers made 
the sporting suggestion that he should receive no advance 
on account of royalties, but a thirty per cent, royalty from 
the beginning, and that he accepted the offer. 

When I wrote to Vachell to ask him what had made Ijjm 
turn his attention to writing, he wrote back — 

" My dear Sladen, 

" Bad times in California turned me to scribbling, 
although I had written some short stories for the magazines, 
I am rather proud of the fact that I burnt my first very long 
novel on the advice of a friend, who said that he could find 
a publisher for it, and yet urged cremation instead ! " 

Vachell told me that one of the triumphs in his career which 
he valued most was the winning of the half-mile race for Sand- 
hurst against Woolwich, which gave them the victory in the 
Sports that year, 1881. Later he was asked to run against 
Myers, the famous American, but wisely refused to do so. 

He told me an amusing story of the hundred-pound prize 
which T. P.'s Weekly offered for the person who could discover 
most mistakes, typographical and so forth, in one of his 
novels, which he had been unable to revise himself. A parson 
wrote to him most indignantly, saying that there were no 
mistakes at all in the book, and that he was surprised that 
Vachell should lend himself to a cheap dodge for advertising 
a novel. He hinted that Vachell had obtained money from 
him — ^he had bought a six-shilling copy — under false pre- 
tences ! Vachell in return sent him one announcement of 
the result of the competition. The man who won the prize 
discovered nearly four hundred errors ! This sounds quite 
incredible, but it is true, as a most lengthy document in his 
possession proves. The knowledge of his works displayed by 
the winner fairly confounded him. 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 273 

He had some strange personal experiences in California. 
A big cowboy rushed out of a saloon in the West, one day, 
followed by another cowboy brandishing a big six-shooter. 
The first cowboy took refuge behind the only cover in sight, 
a telegraph-post. He dodged round this, while the second 
cowboy emptied his pistol into the post. All six bullets 
were in the post ! Afterwards, when he was chaffed by me 
for missing his man, he retorted, " Boys, the son of a gun 
shrunk ! " Both cowboys were full of sheep-herder's delight. 

And he told me another amusing Californian anecdote. 

" I met a pretty girl whom I had not seen for months. 
She informed me that she was engaged to be married, and 
when I asked for details, she replied, ' He is not very rich 
in this world's goods, but in morals, Mr. Vachell, he's a 
millionaire.' She married her moral millionaire, and about 
a year later I met her again. She was alone. Remembering 
her phrase, I said, ' How is your moral millionaire ? ' She 
replied instantly, ' He's bust ! ' I heard later that she had 
just divorced him." 

And a short while ago he sent me one of the best newspaper 
bulls I remember, which appeared in the Western Daily Press 
review of Loot, on Dec. 19, 1913. 

" Mr. Vachell, who is perhaps most widely known as the 
author of one of the best modern stories of school life. The 
Hell, in which Harrow is described," etc. 

Another of those whom the gods love is A. E. W. Mason, 
who met with success very early. Mason was a Dulwich 
boy, and a Trinity, Oxford, man, and was on the stage before 
he took to literature, to his permanent advantage, for it 
gave him that practical acquaintance with stage-craft which 
hastened his success as a dramatist. 

From the moment that he published The Courtship of 
Morrice Buckler it was recognised that Mason was a romance- 
writer with the charm of an Anthony Hope. And his 
reputation has gone on increasing. The Four Feathers was 
a book of genius. Unlike most authors. Mason has remained 
a bachelor, consoling himself with yacht-sailing among the 
Hebrides when he grows tired of social distractions and 
politics. For some years he represented the important 



274 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

constituency of Coventry in Parliament as a Liberal. And 
he was one of the few Liberals who dared to be independent, 
which is probably the reason why he gave up politics. He 
was one of the most boyish-looking members in the House, 
blue-eyed, clean-shaven, fresh-coloured and slim. He has 
changed very little since he left Trinity. He is a charming 
public speaker, and his boyishness is one of his great charms 
in speaking. My friendship with Mason began on our first 
visit to Salcombe, the little Devonshire town on the wooded 
inlet which lies behind the Bolt Head. He had sailed into 
the inlet in a small yacht, and came to see me as an old 
Trinity man. Mason is one of the men who count. 

Max Pemberton has had many successes in his half-century 
of life. Educated at Merchant Taylors, and Caius, Cambridge, 
he nearly got into the Cambridge boat. He started his literary 
life by editing one of the chief boys' papers and writing 
boys' books — his Iron Pirate had a prodigious vogue among 
future men. From this he soon passed to editing CasselVs 
Magazine, which occupied ten of his fifty years, and writing 
novels, with their scenes laid in romantic and half-civilised 
countries — what one might call " Balkan " novels. In these 
he has hardly any rivals, because to an instinct for construc- 
tion, and skill in dialogue and description, he adds unusual 
ingenuity in contriving plots and selecting subjects, and 
accuracy in handling facts. Pemberton's novels present most 
vivid pictures of the far countries in which their scenes are laid. 

I met him first at the Savage Club ; we were sitting next to 
each other at dinner, and he introduced himself as the editor 
of CasselVs Magazine, and asked if I felt disposed to write 
a series of Japanese stories for him — the stories which were 
afterwards worked up to When We were Lovers in Japan 
{Playing the Game). I was very much flattered by his 
proposal, and from that day to this we have remained intimate 
friends. This series was followed by the series of Sicilian 
stories which were worked up into my novel, Sicilian Lovers. 
In both series I was to give as much local colour as possible. 

After this we began to go to each other's houses, and I well 
remember the first time that we went to Pemberton's, before 
he had moved to Fitzjohn's Avenue. It was a Sunday even- 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 275 

ing, and he had asked us to meet poor Fletcher Robinson, 
who would have been one of the greatest journalists of the 
day if he had survived. He was born to it, for he was a 
nephew of old Sir John Robinson, who managed the Daily 
News for many years. He was, at the time of his death, 
assistant editor of a great daily, and he was one of the persons 
whose death was attributed to incurring the displeasure of 
the celebrated Egyptian mummy in the British Museum. 
He was a huge, fair man, with curly sandy hair; he was 
beloved of society, and a poet as well as an editor. 

The popular account of his death is that, not believing in 
the malignant powers of the celebrated mummy-case in the 
British Museum, he determined to make a slashing attack on 
the belief in the columns of the Daily Express, and went to 
the museum, and sent his photographer there, to collect the 
materials for that purpose : that he was then, although in 
the most perfect health, struck down mysteriously by some 
malady of which he died. The ancient Egyptians certainly 
seem to have been able to protect the tombs and coffins 
and bodies of their dead by active spiritual powers, which I 
respect. But in any case, the adage of chivalry, de mortuis 
nil nisi bonum, ought to prevent people from behaving un- 
kindly to anything that concerns the dead. 

We continued to see a good deal of the Pembertons till 
Max took Troston Hall in Suffolk because he found that 
London gaieties interfered with his work. But a few years 
later he felt drawn back to London, and took chambers in 
St. James's, though he kept Troston on, and it was in those 
chambers that he wrote one of his great successes, the revue 
Hallo Ragtime — the best and most popular revue ever written. 

Unlike so many of our leading authors. Max Pemberton, 
who is a distinguished-looking man — one would take him 
for a diplomat — is as interesting to meet as his books are 
to read. He shines in society. 

A mutual friend of us both is Robert Leighton. Mrs. 
Leighton I have mentioned above. Leighton's gifts are of 
a serious editorial order, though he has written boys' books 
of wide popularity. The Leightons are among the most 
popular figures at literary gatherings — they are so lovable 



276 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

that they have an immense circle of friends. Robert Leighton 
is recognised as having no superior as a writer on dogs. They 
have left their house in St. John's Wood now and gone to 
live in an old-world house at Lowestoft. 

When Arthur Morrison, who was already known as a 
brilliant journalist, one of Henley's most incisive young men, 
made such a success with his Tales of Mean Streets and his 
Martin Hewitt stories, one imagined that he would pour 
out a stream of books like other writers who have " boomed." 
But he has been exceedingly moderate. We had a bond of 
sympathy which used to bring him to our house. We had 
a collection of very unusual Japanese curios of the humble 
order, and he had one of the finest collections of Japanese 
prints in the country. We never saw as much of him as 
we wished because he lived in Essex, and when the success 
of his books enabled him to do his work where he liked, he 
grew more and more reluctant to come to London. 

Another man of that generation to whom we grew much 
attached was Eden Phillpotts. In those days he was strug- 
gling with ill-health and over-work. London did not agree 
with him, and he had to write his novels in the intervals of 
journalism. Though he told me that they seldom went out 
elsewhere, he and his pretty wife were often at 32 Addison 
Mansions. They lived at Bedford Park in those days. While 
he was assistant editor of Black and White — that paper edited 
by so many of our friends — it seemed to be a different one 
every year, during its brief existence — he began to feel the 
strain a good deal, and finally determined to burn his ships 
and go back to his native Devon — he was a grandnephew of the 
famous Bishop of Exeter — and depend entirely upon his novels. 
The experiment was a complete success. His health 
improved in his native air, and directly he could give the 
proper leisure to writing his novels, he sprang into almost 
the first rank — alike for the extraordinary power of his stories, 
for his intimate knowledge of Devonshire and Devonian 
character, and for the individuality of his style. Phillpotts 
never deteriorates. He is one of those men who carry the 
stamp of intelligence and simpatica on their faces. Now he 
is following in the footsteps of the other great novelists and 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 277 

getting a footing on the stage, where he will be well repre- 
sented this year. 

Robert Hichens is a very handsome and intellectual- 
looking man — if his portrait had been executed by the steel 
engravers of a hundred years ago it would have borne a 
striking resemblance to the portraits of Lord Byron. He 
has regular, clear-cut, refined features, of a very similar type. 
I have not run across Hichens as often as might be expected 
in Sicily and Egypt, though we have both been in these 
countries, especially the former, so much. But I did meet 
him one evening at Luxor, in the midst of one of those superb 
Egyptian sunsets. He was on his dahabea, which he had 
brought over from its usual anchorage near the bar on the 
Thebes side. It was a luxurious and very Oriental-looking 
dahabea. The saloon, separated from the cabins by heavy 
Persian curtains, would have made a far more picturesque 
scene for Bella-Donna on the stage than the stesun-dahabea 
which appeared in the actual play. He was living on one 
of the old sailing-dahabeas, which are the most delightful to 
occupy, though people generally do not sail up from Cairo 
nowadays, but have them towed up to Luxor before they 
join them, so as to have all their time in the picturesque, 
temple-studded reach between Luxor and Assuan. 

That meeting is riveted in my mind, because Hichens, in 
thanking me for a long and enthusiastic review which I had 
written over my signature in the Queen about his Garden of 
Allah, said that though I had spoken in such terms of the 
book, and brought out all its good points, he had a conviction 
that in my heart of hearts I felt a sort of repulsion for it, 
which was true. I thought the heroine's falling in love with 
such a man at first, and her sending him back to his cell as 
a monk afterwards, equally repellent ; while I could not help 
doing homage to the book, and revelling in its Eastern setting. 

Some time after my return to England I was nearly brought 
into a very close relation with Hichens. 

One morning Sir George Alexander came post-haste to 
call on me. I was not in. So at lunch a telegram as long as 
a letter arrived — would I see him in the theatre after such 
an act that night? The royal box was at my disposal if I 



278 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

cared to see the play. I telephoned my acceptance to 
Helmsley — a good actor, but far too good a manager to be 
spared to take a part — and wondered what was up. When 
I got to the theatre, I discovered what I was wanted for. 
Hichens's Bella-Donna was coming on. All the preparations 
were ready for his inspection, and Hichens could not be 
found by telegram in Europe or Africa. Alexander asked 
if I would superintend the staging. The fee fixed was a 
liberal one. But I was in a quandary. I knew that neither 
J. Bernard Fagan, who had dramatised the story, nor Alex- 
ander, had ever been in Egypt, and that the play and its 
mounting, however well done, must be full of slips, to which 
I ought to object. About Alexander I was not disturbed, 
for I knew that his only idea would be to get the thing right. 
But with Fagan it might be different. He would doubtless 
have been studying the subject fiercely, and I should have to 
reckon with his amour propre, and probably lose a friend — 
who had been at Trinity, Oxford, like myself — that delightful 
Sheridan-like person and personality, so I gave rather a 
modified consent. I suggested that fresh efforts should be 
made to find Hichens, but promised that if finally he 
could not be found I would take his place in correcting the 
Egyptianities of the piece. 

Fortunately, at the last minute Hichens did turn up, and 
I was saved from the responsibility. I was very grateful, 
for when the first night came, and with it stalls for the 
performance, there were many little points to which I should 
have had to take exception, though they made no difference 
to the enjoyment of such of the public as had not been in 
Egypt. Still, I am sure that Fagan would have felt sore 
about my correcting his scenes like a schoolboy's Latin verses. 
As it happened, Alexander and Mrs. Patrick Campbell were 
so magnificent in their parts, and the piece was so splendidly 
produced, that the public did not bother itself about small 
details, but flocked to see the play. It could hardly have 
been a greater success than it was for any improvements 
that I could have suggested. I never saw Hichens at his 
residence in Taormina — we never happened to be in the 
Sicilian Eden at the same moment. 




.. r/^. 




W. B. MAXWELL 

Drawn by Yosliio Markino 



CHAPTER XXII 

MY NOVELIST FRIENDS : PART II 

W. B. Maxwell I hardly knew in those days, though I 
had met him years before, and, in the long and elaborate 
review which I wrote of his Vivien, had hailed him as 
a novelist who would rise to the very head of his craft. 

Maxwell, of course, had heredity and atmosphere in his 
favour. His mother, the famous Miss Braddon, had written 
novels which took the world by storm long before he was 
born — it is more than half a century ago since an astonishing 
girl founded a new school of fiction with Lady Audley's 
Secret and Aurora Floyd — and he and his wife live with his 
mother in a stately old Queen Anne mansion in the Sheen 
Road at Richmond. Maxwell, who looks like a youthful 
judge — he is clean-shaven, and has a calm, judicial face, 
with an illuminating smile — has a judge's gift of scrutiny 
in reviewing life in his books. He is ruthlessly just with his 
characters ; they cannot deceive him. His sentences are not 
too severe. But whatever their sentences are, the criminals 
leave the court moral wrecks. He is obliged to mete out 
just sentences, but he is ruthless in his summing up. His 
last novel, The DeviVs Garden, is an excellent example of his 
great impeachments of wrong. His books have the Ate — 
the Nemesis — tracking down their victims as ruthlessly as 
the (Edipus is tracked down in the tragedies of ancient 
Greece. 

Another writer whose novels I admire immensely, and I 
have had to review a good many of them, is H, B. Marriott 
Watson, the New Zealander. He has a large public, and, 
in my opinion, ought to have a far larger one. As a writer 
of novels of adventure, I think he has no superior among the 
noveHsts of the day. For his adventures are most romantic, 

279 



280 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

and his writing is so good — so delicate where it ought to be 
dehcate, so strong where it ought to be strong. Added to 
which, he is scrupulous about getting his local colour and 
" properties " correct. In appearance he is a typical colonist 
— a huge man, with a dark, resolute face. When he first 
became prominent in the literary world, you might have 
thought that he was captain of the famous " All Black " 
football team, rather than a writer. Apart from his success 
as a novelist, he has been a power in journalism. 

Charles Garvice, whose novels have a greater circulation 
than those of any other living writer, is now my neighbour. 
We live exactly opposite each other, with the breadth of 
Richmond Green between, with its old lawns, and tall elms 
planted by dead kings. He lives in one of the Maids of 
Honour houses, built a couple of centuries ago, abutting on 
the wall of the Old Palace of the Tudors, in which Queen 
Elizabeth died, and those Maids of Honour served. It has 
some beautiful eighteenth-century painted panelling. I look 
out on its mellow brickwork, pointed with white stone, and 
the fantastic Georgian ironwork of its gate, half-buried in 
a tangle of swaying roses, from my study windows, just as I 
look out on the crenellated wall and old perpendicular 
archway of King Henry VII's palace on the other side of 
the clipped yew and the great stone-pine. 

When I first knew Garvice, twenty years ago, he was 
farming his own lands in Devonshire, and just beginning to 
find his public on this side, though he had long enjoyed an 
enormous public in America. He used to pay frequent 
visits to the Authors' Club, where, since he had rooms 
in Whitehall Court, he was more of a habitue than many 
men who lived in London, and became extremely popular 
for his genuine good-fellowship. A few years ago, when the 
Club was rather languishing, he became chairman of the 
committee which undertook its reconstruction, and though 
he had in the interval become one of the most popular and 
hard-worked novelists of the day, lavished his time and 
energies with happy results, so that now it has even more 
members than the Athenaeum, and far more than any other 
literary club. He is the central figure at its great dinners. 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 281 

He wrote a delightful book about farming — not a literary- 
exercise, but as the outcome of many years' practical work. 
Garvice, undoubtedly, has the largest sale of any novelist 
in the world. I have seen the figures. Last year's sales 
alone amounted to 1,750,000 copies — books of all prices. 
His romantic love-stories are conspicuous not only for their 
thrilling plots — Garvice is a born story-writer — but for their 
freedom from all deleterious influence. There is nothing 
goody-goody about them ; they are just wholesome, straight- 
forward romances — an almost lost art. He is only the 
length of the Palace away from the river, where he keeps 
a sailing-boat, and he is fond of riding in Richmond Park. 
He needs recreations, for he is a very hard worker. Every 
morning he goes up to his office in London, where he spends 
the business day in dictating his novels, and he gives many 
of his evenings up to the Authors' Club, which, under his 
chairmanship, and the tireless secretaryship of Algernon 
Rose, has now a membership of 1,600. Garvice is a great 
reader of his brother-authors' books. 

Feeling that the public would like to know the secret of 
one of the most remarkable literary successes on record — 
more than six millions of his books have been sold — one 
night when I had run in to see him, I got him to tell me his 
story over a pipe — he smokes hard all the time he dictates 
his stories, and cannot go on when his pipe goes out till it 
is refilled. This is what he told me. 

" My first novel, though I had written a number of short 
stories before this, was about the last of the three-deckers. 
When it was revised and re- written quite recently, for a cheap 
edition, I understood fully why, in its first form, it was not 
the brilliant success I, a youth of nineteen, expected it to 
be. Quite early in my literary career I made the acquaint- 
ance, which grew into a warm friendship, of the proprietor 
of a weekly fiction periodical which had attained an enormous 
circulation. He was a clever editor, with a keen nose for 
good stuff; and he would buy nothing else, for he had hit 
upon the excellent idea that, if you gave the masses good 
stuff at a low price, they would jump at it. They jumped. 
I wrote the leading story for this paper for many years, and 



282 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

was well paid. The serials attracted the attention of George 
Munro, the famous American publisher, who was running 
a similar paper in New York. He arranged for me to send 
advance sheets for it, and he afterwards published the serial 
in cheap book form. They had an enormous — to me a 
fabulous — sale, and are still selling. 

" Munro started a sevenpenny magazine, asking me to 
edit the English part of it, and to write a serial and a series 
of short stories. I worked nearly day and night, and was 
so fully occupied and contented that, absurd as it may sound, 
I never gave a thought to publishing the serials in book 
form here in England; notwithstanding that the books 
were so popular in America that one of George Munro's rivals 
hit upon the extremely ingenious idea of waiting until half 
a novel of mine was published in serial form, getting some one 
one else to finish it, and issuing it in volume form before I had 
finished the story. Of course, this was before the Inter- 
national Copyright Act. Blessings on its name ! 

" One day, my friend, that brilliant journalist, Robert 
Harborough Sherard, while sitting at my writing-desk, took 
up the American edition of Just a Girl. When I told him 
it was not published in volume form in England, he asked 
my permission to take it away and try to place it. He took 
it to Mr. Coulson Kernahan, who recommended it to the 
publisher for whom he was reading. It came out, and, to 
my surprise and delight, proved a success. The review 
that, more than any other, helped me, was a very kind one 
in the Queen.^ Then, again, the books were so fortunate as 
to win the approval of Dr. (now Sir) William Robertson 
Nicoll ; and when he likes a book he does not fail to say so. 

" The rest of my literary career, if the phrase may be 
permitted me, is public property. I may add that, in my 
early days, I sold the copyrights of my stories. Later on, 
I got them back by the simple expedient of buying the 
periodical, lock, stock and barrel, in which they had ap- 
peared; and I am glad to be able to state that I hold now 
the copyright of everything I have written. Some of the 
books have been dramatised, and others are on their way to 
1 Written by myself.— D. S. 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 283 

the stage; indeed, at an early age, I made a dramatic essay 
with a httle play in two acts, which was produced at the 
Royalty Theatre, and obtained a success chiefly, if not 
entirely, owing to the splendid cast; amongst others, I was 
fortunate enough to have such actors as Richard Mansfield, 
who afterwards became so famous in America, that sterling 
player, Charles Denny, and Fred Everill, of the Haymarket. 
It would be a poor play such men as these could not pull 
through. Encouraged by my first effort, I might have 
directed all my attention to the stage, but fiction had got 
a firm hold upon me; it was safe and regular — and there 
you are ! But I am making a new start, and ' you never 
can tell,' as Mr. Shaw says. 

" The story of my lecturing is soon told. I gave a lecture, 
consisting of recitals linked together by biographical notes, 
for a Bideford debating society. An agent who happened 
to hear it, thought it good enough for the general public, and 
for some years past I have, during the winter months, ap- 
peared on the lecture platform. It is a change of work, 
which is good ; and it is lucrative, which is also good, if not 
better. 

" I have just been elected President of the Institute of 
Lecturers. The duties of this office will fill in my spare 
time — when I get it." 

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (" Q "), another admirable 
writer, not only of novels, but of poems and essays, I have 
seen hardly at all since he left Oxford, where, sometime after 
me, he occupied my old panelled set of rooms at Trinity (of 
which he was a Scholar like myself, and A. E. W. Mason an 
Exhibitioner some years later), attracted probably by the 
fact that they had been Cardinal Newman's rooms when he 
was an undergraduate. Couch was a splendid example of 
the mens sana in corpore sano. He was stroke of the College 
boat, as well as the most brilliant Trinity man of his time 
intellectually, and he looked it. He had a lithe, active 
figure, and a humorous, self-reliant face, with light eyes — 
the type which takes so much beating. For a brief time he 
had a very successful journalistic career in London, but he 
quickly decided that it was not worth while to live in London 



284 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

unless you were rich enough to do all the nice things which 
came along, and returned to his native Cornwall to devote 
himself to literature. In Cornwall he not only wrote de- 
lightful books, but went in for sailing, and became a power in 
local Liberal politics, and was knighted. Recently he has 
become Professor of Poetry in the University of Cambridge 
— a post he was admirably fitted to fill, since the mantle 
of Francis Turner Palgrave fell upon him as an anthologist. 
His Oxford Book of Verse is simply delightful. 

Couch had from the first been a stylist. When congratu- 
lated early in his career on the exquisite writing of a short 
story, he deprecated its importance, because it was too 
conscious an imitation of De Maupassant. " My great 
difficulty is not to imitate my models," he said. In the light 
of this saying, it is interesting to recall the fact that in 1897 
he was chosen for the high honour of completing Robert 
Louis Stevenson's St. Ives, which he did with absolute 
success. Stevenson must have been one of the models he 
was trying not to imitate. There is no reason why he should, 
for no one could want a more delightful style than his own. 
Hetty Wesley is an exquisite book. 

Sir Henry Rider Haggard I ought to have mentioned long 
before this, since he has been one of the recognised heads 
of the novelists' profession for many years. Haggard had 
the good fortune for an imaginative man to go out to South 
Africa when he and the South African question were young. 
He was on the staff of Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the Official 
Commissioner in the Transvaal, and actually assisted in 
hoisting the British Flag over the Republic in 1887. His 
first book, published in 1882, was about South African 
politics, but in 1884 he began as a novelist, with Dawn, and 
in 1886 he achieved world-wide fame with King Solomon''s 
Mines, one of the finest romances ever written. She came 
out a year later, and confirmed the success. He has written 
many other famous novels. For years he was always quoted 
as the most successful novelist — but that was before the 
days of " booming," a practice against which Haggard has 
steadily set his face. He told his agent that he would not 
ever write to order, unless he was driven to it — that the bare 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 285 

fact of having signed a contract to produce a given thing by 
a given time paralysed his pen. Besides writing novels of 
increasing seriousness, Haggard, like Doyle, has proved 
himself a patriot, with the deepest sense of his responsibilities 
as a citizen. He has twice tried to get into Parliament, 
with a view to legislation for restoring agriculture in England, 
and he has given his time lavishly, both to the investigation 
of the agricultural question and to serving on various 
Commissions, as well as to writing books on various subjects 
connected with the land. He came back from South Africa 
and went to live in his native Norfolk many years ago, 
but in spite of this he has done his duty in attending literary 
gatherings. His active figure, and close-trimmed beard, 
give him the cut of a naval officer. 

His brother. Major Arthur Haggard, who has seen much 
service in Africa, and written well-known books, has done 
patriotic service for his country in another way by organising 
the Union Jack Club and the Veterans' Club for soldiers 
and sailors. 

Another visitor to Addison Mansions in latter days was 
William Romaine Paterson, better known as " Benjamin 
Swift " — a man of extraordinary ability, whom I should not 
be surprised to see in a Radical Cabinet. The moment you 
meet him you are aware that you are in the presence of an 
intellect of the first rank, and an uncompromising personality. 
A deep reader and thinker, he has the gift of clear expression 
and glittering sarcasm. I have seldom heard a more effective 
speaker. He has already written a number of remarkable 
novels. He is a born leader, and he looks it, with his com- 
manding figure, his face, of the eagle type, and his burning 
eye. 

I ought to have mentioned Morley Roberts before, because 
he was a man of whom I saw much in those days. He was 
often at our at-homes, and nearly always in the Authors' 
Club when I went there. He was the greatest personality 
there in those days — not only as an author whose books 
every one in the Club admired, long before the public took 
them at their true value, but for his wide and deep knowledge, 
and for the adventures he had successfully concluded with 



286 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

his splendid physique. We always felt that Morley Roberts 
was essentially a man, that the strength of his books was due 
to the daring life he had led. I have very seldom heard 
Morley Roberts make a speech, but I have seen him hold a 
whole room of brilliant men from his easy-chair beside the 
fire, while he unfolded some curious piece of knowledge with 
surprising power and interestingness. It was he who said 
that books of adventure are generally written by sedentary 
cowards for sedentary cowards. 

I met Morley Roberts first at a garden-party given by 
Rosamund Marriott Watson, the poetess, whose husband 
I have for many years considered one of the finest novelists 
of the day. She introduced us to each other because we 
had both been to Australia, and I rather think that she 
accused him as well as myself of having wooed the Muse of 
Poetry (though there was no Muse of Poetry among the 
immortal nine). After that he came a good many times to 
our house, though he never was fond of at-homes, and I 
don't remember his ever coming back after his long illness. 
A very strong man, six feet high, or thereabouts, with a 
commanding face, and flashing dark eyes, he was always 
one of the most conspicuous figures in the room. He had 
been a sailor before the mast, a navvy out west, a hand on 
a ranch, and I don't know what all in his adventurous youth. 

It seems incredible to think that Somerset Maugham, who 
is barely forty, should have been a long time coming into 
his own, yet ten years elapsed between the publication of 
Liza of Lambeth and the production of Lady Frederick, and 
in the interval he had written those delightful books The 
Merry-go-Round and The Bishop's Apron. He came to us 
with a mutual friend in the year 1897, when he had just 
written Liza. I remember, when I read it, venturing, as 
an old reviewer, to prophesy that such a writer must leap 
into fame forthwith. I was sure of it when I read The 
Merry-go-Round, but the public did not quite answer to 
my expectations. I have always heard that Liza of Lambeth 
was inspired by the gruesome sights and sounds which were 
his environment when he was at St. Thomas' Hospital, 
that he lodged in some street where, from his back windows, 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 287 

he could see the she-hooUgans hitting each other with their 
babies. He is, a rare thing for an author, an admirable dancer. 

Another man born in the same year, 1874, who came to 
his own through plays, and was even longer in doing it, is 
Edward Knoblauch, the author of Kismet, and joint author 
of Milestones. Knoblauch, who is an American, born in 
New York, and educated at Harvard, and his sister, came to 
us with Lena Ashwell a good many years ago. Knoblauch 
was Lena's reader at the Kingsway, and collaborated with 
the Askews in The Shulamite, in which she created such a 
splendid character. He had already adapted The Partikler 
Pet for Cyril Maude. But he was writing plays for years 
before he had a single one accepted, and it was not until 
1911 that he sprang into general fame with Kismet, quickly 
followed by Milestones. 

Louis Napoleon Parker, another old member of the Authors' 
Club, is a very old friend of mine. I think it was Adrian 
Ross who introduced us, when he first came up from Sher- 
borne School, where he was appointed Director of Music 
upon leaving the Royal Academy of Music, Strangely 
enough, one who has composed such delightful music is 
extremely deaf. For many years, of course, he has been one 
of our leading and most prolific playwrights, and only a 
short while ago he composed the incidental music for his 
drama, Drake. Parker, who was born in France, and might 
almost pass for a Frenchman, has been the translator of 
some of the most celebrated French plays which have been 
" Englished " for our stage — Chanticleer, UAiglon and 
Cyrano de Bergerac among them. He has had yet another 
sphere of activity in producing the series of splendid masques 
which are associated with his name. He is, indeed, practi- 
cally the inventor of the masque in its present form, such as 
the Sherborne pageant, the Warwick pageant and the York 
pageant. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

MY NOVELIST FRIENDS : PART III 

Henry Harland, who justly made such a prodigious hit 
with that exquisite book, The CardinaVs Snuff-box, I knew 
well in America. Stedman introduced us at one of his 
at-homes. He wrote then under the pseudonym of " Sidney 
Luska," and was best known for some big action he had had 
with some firm of publishers in New York, the American 
Cassells, I think. He was a very opinionated man, and I did 
not at the time believe that he would ever write so fine a book 
as The CardinaVs Snuff-box, which breathes the very air of 
Italy, and is the most exquisite idyll of Italian life which we 
have in the language. But it is only just to him to say that 
Stedman, in introducing him, spoke of him in terms which 
should have made me believe this. He was born in St. 
Petersburg, and looked rather like a Russian. He would 
have been fifty-two if he had been alive. Lane always 
believed in him, and made him editor of the Yellow Book. 
He and his pretty little wife had a flat in Cromwell Road, 
and were popular in the " precious " section of literary 
society. His early death was a great loss to literature. 

Frank Bullen is one of the most interesting personalities 
I have met in literature. He is so many-sided in his abilities 
and his experiences. After being an errand-boy, and every- 
thing up to chief officer on a sailing-ship, and a clerk in the 
meteorological office at Greenwich, he became a writer, an 
orator and a philanthropist. No one has done more for the 
men of the Merchant Service, for while he did all that man 
could for them practically, he enlisted the sympathies of 
the world for them in his books. A small, dark man, with 
very bright eyes, and a sympathetic manner, except when 
he is moved to indignation, he was born to dominate great 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 289 

audiences, especially when he is telling them of wrongs 
which need practical redress. The wonders of the Lord 
which he saw when he went down to the sea in ships, made 
such a profound impression on his imagination that they fill 
the pages of his books with eloquence and knowledge. With 
the exception of Joseph Conrad, he has no rival among living 
writers as a sea-novelist. I think I met him at the Idler 
first. I know that we became friends from the first day. 

Dion Clayton Calthrop, that prince of light novelists, who 
is always finding fame by some new stroke of genius, was 
our neighbour for several years at Addison Mansions. He 
is such a distinguished-looking man that I used to watch him 
and wonder who he was, until one night I met him through 
a mutual friend. It is not surprising that he is so brilliant, 
because he is the son of John Clayton, the actor, and grandson 
of Dion Boucicault. 

When I asked Calthrop, who started as an artist, what 
made him take up writing, he said — 

" I really took up writing owing to a bout of insomnia 
when I was living in Paris, and as I was painting in the schools 
all day, I tried to write at night. I read the sketches to 
Norman Angell, a friend of mine (who wrote The Great 
Illusion), and through him met Manuel, the artist, and 
through him they were published in The Butterfly. 

" I believe in many irons in the fire ; people specialise 
too much, so I have books, plays, dress designs, or scene 
models, and a picture or two, all going at once, and it is a 
great cause for regret to me that I cannot write music. In 
the great days of Art, artists were so interested in life that 
they tried everything — why shouldn't we? I even have 
a rock-garden full of Alpine flowers on my writing desk — 
true, it is only four feet by one — but it is very interesting to 
see flowers grow as you work. As a matter of fact, I am 
writing against an Alpine crocus, trying to finish a book as 
it comes into bloom." 

Desmond Coke, one of the most brilliant of our younger 
novelists, I met in 1904 through his mother, Mrs. Talbot 
Coke, who had been my colleague on the Queen, the wife 
of one of our generals in the Boer War. Mrs. Talbot Coke 



290 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

was at the time — as she is still — one of the principal con- 
tributors to Hearth and Home, a paper which served as a 
literary cradle to Robert Hichens, whilst it was sub-edited 
by no less a personage than Arnold Bennett, who was just 
beginning to write his series of great novels about the pottery 
towns. 

Desmond Coke, who, under the pseudonym of " Charbon," 
wrote the reviews in a lively strain, possibly sometimes more 
welcome to his readers than to the novelist reviewed, was at 
the time I speak of fresh from Oxford, which he had made his 
own in fiction with that delirious skit on feminine fiction, 
Sandjord of Merton. Since then he has written a number of 
novels, distinguished for their original ideas. He has long 
been a keen collector, as his chambers in a backwater off 
Oxford Street show, and has of late turned his collecting to 
good account by writing the classic on The Art of Silhouette. 
He is very accomplished, and is one of the chief pillars of 
Chapman & Hall's publishing house. The announcement, 
however, that Mr. H. B. Irving has secured his three-act 
play, One Hour of Life, proves that here is yet another novelist 
who, given the opportunity, would gladly exchange the 
quiet covers of Bookland for the more adventurous and hectic 
boards of Theatredom ! 

E. H. Cooper was a very dear friend of mine, who came near 
being one of the conspicuous figures of his time. He had 
a short life and a merry one — merry, at all events, for his 
friends. He was, perhaps, too cynical ever to be quite 
merry himself, except with children. His father was a 
Staffordshire country gentleman, with an estate adjoining 
the Duke of Sutherland's, and the Duchess and her children 
and her nephews and nieces were much attached to that 
wayward genius. While he was still an undergraduate at 
Oxford, he contracted the taste for gambling on horse-races, 
which kept him a poor man, but enabled him to write one 
of the best racing novels of the language — Mr. Blake of 
Newmarket. That did not prevent him from writing de- 
lightful children's books, inspired by the Duchess's children. 
He was a very handsome and romantic-looking man, with 
wonderful iron-grey eyes, but, like Byron, was born lame. 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 291 

For a brief time he edited the Daily Mail, as a locum teTiens, 
I believe, and for a long time he was Paris correspondent 
of the New York World. Once, during that period, he made 
a big coup at Chantilly, and for some days pressed me with 
letters and telegrams to go and stay with him for a week 
at Paris and " paint the town absolutely red " at his expense. 
We were to stay at the Ritz. He said he was going to be 
really rich for a week, and it would supply me with the 
material for a whole novel. But if he was determined to 
waste his one stroke of luck, I was not going to be a party to 
it, and I not only refused, but did my utmost to wean him 
from the idea — unsuccessfully, I think. If Cooper had really 
given his mind to novel-writing and journalism, he might have 
made a great name, for he was brilliantly clever, and his dis- 
tinction of manner made him an impressive figure in society. 
We were drawing near the end of our time at Addison 
Mansions when I met Jeffery Farnol. Farnol, who is still 
young, is as likely as any one to rank among the foremost 
novelists of his time. His Broad Highway is one of the best 
books produced by the generation, and The Amateur Gentle- 
man was a good successor to it. He is an Englishman born, 
but lived some time in America, where he made his living 
as a scene-painter. There he wrote his great novel, and 
after disappointments in searching for a publisher he sent 
it to Shirley Byron Jevons, at that time editor of the Sports- 
man, a relative of the celebrated Professor Stanley Jevons, 
the Political Economist, and brother of Dr. Frank Jevons, 
Vice-Chancellor of Durham University, he himself being 
now connected with literary journalism. Shirley Jevons at 
once recognised it as something like a work of genius, and 
taking it to the old firm of Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 
Ltd., told them that they must publish it. It made its way 
a little slowly at first, but then the public, led by the strong 
convictions of one man, swept him on to fame on an irre- 
sistible tide. Farnol was born in Birmingham thirty-five 
years ago. His parents came to London when he was seven, 
and he has made a suburb of it, Lee, in Kent, his permanent 
home, though business may take him to the United States 
for months at a time. 



292 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

He married in his early twenties the daughter of Hawley, 
the scenic and architectural artist, an Englishman living in 
America. She was on a visit to relatives in England, and the 
rash young couple, soon after the birth of a daughter, their 
only child, resolved to try their fortunes on the other side 
of the Atlantic, the plucky and fascinating little wife sharing 
there his bad fortune as now she shares his good. The 
struggle was hard enough for a time, and, if Farnol cared to 
relate all that he went through in those years, the story would 
be a human document of great interest. At my house he 
met Yoshio Markino. I was about to introduce the already 
famous Jap to the coming young Englishman, when the 
impulsive Markino rushed at and fondled him, crying out 
in delight, " Why, it's Jacky ! " They had been fellow 
students at the Goldsmiths' Institute when both were younger, 
and both unknown to fame. There Farnol had shown 
welcome little kindnesses to the lonely, warm-hearted 
stranger from Nippon. Their ways had parted, neither 
thinking to see the other again, and least of all in this dramatic 
fashion and in these brighter circumstances. The Broad 
Highway has been dramatised for America, and is to be staged 
in England. The Amateur Gentleman is also to be adapted 
to the stage. His third important story — he has done many 
shorter things — is likely to be of modern times. 

Francis Gribble is a very old friend of mine; we belonged 
to the same literary clubs, and met constantly at them, and 
he and his charming Dutch wife were often at Addison 
Mansions. Gribble, who is an Oxford First Class man, 
besides his very able novels and his biographies, which are 
recognised as classics on their subject, has made a neglected 
aspect of Switzerland his particular province. He is the 
authority on the Swiss towns, like Geneva and Lauzanne, 
where so much of the scenes of some of his biographies had 
necessarily to be laid. He now spends a good deal of his 
time in Continental travel. I remember his telling me that 
it was through his study of Swiss towns that he was led on 
to write biography. The connecting link was his accidental 
perusal of that wonderful book, Benjamin Constants Journal 
Intime. He saw from it that the life of Madame de Stael 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 293 

needed to be written from a new point of view, then he was 
led on to cover the whole ground of the romantic movement 
in French literature from Rousseau to Victor Hugo. 

Frank Hird I have known many years. I met him first 
as editor of some important journal — I forget what — with 
which I was arranging a contribution, just as I met C. N. 
Williamson first as sub-editor of the Graphic. I was aston- 
ished to find myself in the presence of a person who was 
hardly more than a boy, very good-looking, very well-bred, 
very well-dressed. Since then I have met him repeatedly, 
and enjoyed the friendship of one who fully came up to my 
first prepossession. I have met him most, I think, at the 
hospitable villa of the Joseph Whitakers' in Palermo, where 
he frequently stayed, and showed himself as good in private 
theatricals as he is as an author. The place where he seemed 
most in his element was when he was correspondent to one 
of the chief London newspapers in Rome, and I used to 
meet him in salons like the Countess Lovatelli's. The 
Countess was the sister of the Duke of Sermoneta, one of 
the highest of the Roman nobility, who has a similar position 
to our Duke of Norfolk. The Sermoneta family have a 
proud record in Italian archaeology; the Countess herself 
is an author, and, as a centre of public and literary life, the 
Lady St. Helier of Rome. Her " salon " is said to be the 
only one in which the " Whites " and the " Blacks " habitu- 
ally meet. He was always the diplomatist, more than the 
correspondent, though he was so excellent at his own work, 
and would have risen high in diplomacy if he had made it 
his career. 

Edgar Jepson and his wife were often at Addison Mansions, 
and I used to meet him constantly at the Authors' Club as 
I now meet him at the Dilettanti. He is a man in whom 
his friends believed from the first, and the quality of his books 
and his speaking have amply justified them. Intellectually 
he is a typical Balliol man, but that does not prevent his 
being one of the delights of Bohemia, where his popularity 
is unbounded. Experts are agreed that on his day, he is 
the second best, if not the best, auction-bridge player in 
England. He says of himself, that he is a walking warning 



294 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

against writing fiction, since from his first book he made 0, 
from his second six pounds nineteen and nine, and from 
his third nine pounds ten and fivepence. 

William le Queux has been an intimate friend of mine for 
many years. A Frenchman by birth, he is a strongly 
Imperialist Englishman by naturalisation, and in his writings 
and politics. He has led a most interesting life. He was 
once an artist in the Quartier Latin, but he deserted this for 
journalism, and was sent by The Times as a special corre- 
spondent to Russia, using the opportunity to acquire an 
extraordinary knowledge of the secret workings of the 
Nihilists, just as he has in recent years been very much behind 
the scenes in the Balkans and Turkey. For a while he was 
sub-editor of the Globe, which post he resigned as soon as 
his success as a novelist justified it. Since then he has 
travelled continually, and acquired a unique knowledge of 
the secret service of the Continental Powers. He is one 
of the most popular novelists of the day, the secret of his 
popularity lying in his brilliant handling of mysteries, and 
the use he makes of his knowledge behind the scenes in 
Continental politics. His books dealing with supposed 
invasions of England are masterpieces in their way, showing 
an extraordinary grasp of military details. A member of 
the Athenaeum Club told me once that judges and bishops 
almost quarrelled with each other when a new William le 
Queux book came into the Club. His affable face, with 
bright, dark eyes, behind pince-nez, and an inscrutable 
expression, is familiar to frequenters of the Devonshire 
Club and the Hotel Cecil. The curious thing is that, though 
we have been such friends, and have been frequent visitors 
to the same places on the Continent, from the little republic 
of San Marino, of which he is Consul-General, upwards, 
we have never, so far as I remember, met out of England. 

Bertram Mitford lived side by side with myself and " Adrian 
Ross " at Addison Mansions for years. He belongs to one of 
the oldest families in England. His father, the late E. L. 
Osbaldeston Mitford, of Mitford in Northumberland, which 
has been in the possession of his family since Saxon times, 
appearing in Doomsday Book, was a wonderful old gentle- 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 295 

man; he lived to be more than a hundred years old, and, 
till a few years before his death, used to come up to London 
for first nights at his favourite theatres. 

Bertram Mitford is a good sportsman, who has travelled 
and shot in the back parts of South Africa, and the wild 
lands bordering on India and Afghanistan. His travels have 
inspired novels which are splendid books of adventure. 
He has also been in Italy a good deal. 

Guise Mitford, who has written one or two good novels, 
is his cousin, as is the stately Lord Redesdale, the head of 
a cadet branch of his family, who wrote the famous Tales 
of Old Japan. Miss Mitford, too, a once most popular 
authoress, was of the clan. 

Mitford and I used to see each other constantly in Addison 
Mansions, and frequently at two or three clubs to which 
we both belonged, but I don't remember ever doing the 
journey between together, between them and our flats. 
He often walked both ways for the exercise. 

K. J. Key, the great cricketer, who for many years held 
the record for the Oxford and Cambridge match, with his 
130, and was afterwards Captain of the Surrey Eleven for 
years, one of my most valued friends, introduced me to 
Charles Marriott, of whose novels he was an immense admirer. 
Key is a great reader. Unlike most cricketers, who prefer 
to watch the game intently until they go in to bat, as if they 
were playing whist or bridge, and wanted to see what cards 
were out, he used to read a book or a newspaper till it was 
his turn to go in, and I have no doubt that he saved a good 
deal of nerve energy by doing so. I think he met Marriott 
in Cornwall, to which they are both devoted. Certainly, 
they are both fond of photography. Marriott made a 
considerable succes d'estime with his first novel, The Column. 
He is, or was until recently, the Art critic of one of the great 
London dailies, and is a most accomplished man, of wide 
knowledge, and one of the best novelists of the day. Living 
at Brook Green, he was a near neighbour of ours, and from 
the time that Key introduced us to the time that we left 
Addison Mansions, we saw a good deal of him. Key's wife 
has recently published a novel with a cricketer (not her 



296 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

husband) for its hero — A Daughter of Love. She is a sister 
of Lascelles Abercombie. 

Compton Mackenzie first came to Addison Mansions as 
a small boy at St. Paul's School, where he was a friend of 
my son. They began to be men very early in my son's 
little cupboard of a study, overlooking Lyon's cake-factory. 
I did not see him after he made his fame as a novelist till 
we came to live at Richmond. He has, like myself, a passion 
for gardening. He is, of course, a son of Edward Compton, 
the actor, and Virginia Bateman, and his great-grandmother 
was a Symonds, aunt of John Addington Symonds, so there 
is one of the best strains of literary ability in the family. The 
famous Sir Morell Mackenzie was Edward Compton's cousin. 

When I wrote to ask Compton Mackenzie, who is now 
indulging his passion for gardening by living in Capri and 
making landscapes round his house, what first impelled him 
to write novels, he said — 

" I can remember shooting peas at your guests as they 
came in, and throwing cake, etc. I don't suppose we did it 
always, but I distinctly remember doing it once or twice. 
It is difficult to extract anything from the past and account 
for my writing novels. Yet I always had a passion for 
writing. In the Upper Sixth in 1896, I, with two other boys, 
ran a paper called The Hectona, of which, so far as I know, 
only two numbers are in existence. It was printed on 
gelatine, and all the contributions were copied out by myself 
in my execrable handwriting. Like many magazines since, 
it expired of illegibility. Later, at Oxford, I ran another 
paper called The Oxford Point of View. 

" Gardening I took up to console myself for not being 
able to find a publisher for my first book. It toured round 
London for nearly two years, and I did not sit down and 
write The Carnival until The Passionate Elopement lay bound 
upon my table. This was according to a vow I had made. 
I started very early. The Passionate Elopement was printed 
just after I was twenty-five. It was originally — or some 
of it — a play which I wrote to console my father for having 
got married without warning or expectation. That was 
when I was twenty-two. 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 297 

" The Carnival, I suppose, may be called the result of 
helping my brother-in-law, poor Harry Pelissier, with his 
Alhambra Revue. I used to rehearse the Corps de Ballet, 
and, I suppose, naturally made use of such an opportunity 
to make a book." 

Lord Monkswell, who wrote a single novel, and whose 
sister, the Contessa Arturo di Cadilhac, born Margaret 
Collier, has written some valuable books about life in Italy, 
I met constantly as one of the directors of the Authors' 
Club. He was also my sponsor for another club. He was 
very regular in his attendances at the Board Meetings of the 
Authors' Club, which he occasionally illuminated with a 
naive outbreak, as in his dictum about the National Liberal 
Club. At one of our Board Meetings, I was advocating 
some change in the financial arrangements of the billiard- 
room, and quoted as an example to be followed the rule at 
the National Liberal Club. 

" National Liberal Club ! " cried Lord Monkswell, who 
was at that time Under-Secretary for War in a Liberal 
Government; " why, I don't call that a club at all — I call it 
a railway station ! " 

Richard Orton Prowse has won admiration in high places 
with his work. One of his novels ran as a serial in the 
Cornhill, and he had a play produced by the " Stage Society." 
He used to come to Addison Mansions because we were in 
the same small house at Cheltenham College — Gantillon's, 
in Fauconberg Terrace. There were only about half-a- 
dozen boys in the house, but we used to knock up a game of 
football on a waste bit of ground at the back of the terrace, 
with two small day-boys who lived in an adjoining house. 
There were not more than eight of us all told — I think only 
seven, and of the seven, besides Prowse and myself, there 
were the two famous Renshaws, and the two famous Lambs. 
The Renshaws were very small boys in those days, but so 
absolutely certain in their catching, and their drop-kicking, 
that they counted in football games with boys three or four 
years older. When they grew up, their extraordinary scien- 
tificness in games was proved in the lawn-tennis courts, 
because for j^cars, until one of them died by his own hand. 



298 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

they were undisputed champions. As it happened, I never 
met either of them after they left school, but one day I was 
driving through a remote Buckinghamshire village, White 
Waltham or something of the kind, with a friend, when we 
observed a crowd, in the street outside the village pound, 
of persons whom you would not have expected in such a 
place. We inquired what the trouble was, and found 
that it was an inquest on a suicide — one of the famous 
Renshaws. 

Curiously enough, there was the same element of tragedy 
in the history of the brothers Lamb — Captain Thomas Lamb 
and Captain Edward Lamb, were for years the finest shots 
in the British army. Edward Lamb was the only boy who 
ever won the Spencer Cup twice; when he was at school, 
there had never been such a shot at a public school. Thomas 
Lamb, who had the finest nerve I ever remember in any one, 
broke down in a match when he went over to the United 
States to represent England, and was so mortified that he 
shot himself on the way home. 

I shall always remember with pride that I was the first 
person who ever put a rifle into the hands of those two 
Lambs. I taught them how to shoot, and did most of the 
explaining in that house in Fauconberg Terrace, Cheltenham. 
I was at the time Captain of the school shooting eight, and 
I had won the Spencer Cup myself in the Public Schools 
matches at the preceding Wimbledon Meeting. I rather 
despaired about Tommy Lamb ; he was not quick at taking 
things in, but I knew that if he could learn to shoot, his nerve 
and his doggedness might carry him to any heights of success. 
The houses of Fauconberg Terrace were very high, and there 
was a high parapet about a foot wide on the roof. I have 
seen Tommy Lamb run along that parapet from end to end. 
He said, " If it was only two or three feet from the ground, 
instead of two or three feet from the roof, it would be nothing. 
Why should it make any difference? It is all the same to 
me. 

Several feet from our study window, which had a storey 
underneath it, there was a railing of about the same width. 
He used to jump from our window on to that railing, and keep 



MY NOVELIST FRIENDS 299 

his balance. Anybody could do it, he said, if it was nearer 
the ground. Why should it make any difference? 

And he was always ready to jump from a height of twenty 
or thirty feet, and never hurt himself. 

The seventh boy in those football games was Frank Lamb, 
the youngest brother. I never heard if he did anything in 
after life, but we six, I am quite sure, had no thought beyond 
a football which bounced so unevenly on that piece of 
waste land. 

Tommy Lamb was a very fine fellow, singularly modest 
about his achievements. Several years afterwards, when I 
first came back from Australia, I went down to Wimbledon 
to see the Public Schools Veterans' Match, in which I had 
captained Cheltenham three or four times. Lamb, who was 
then in the flower of his shooting, was very anxious that 
I should take his place in that year's team. He thought it 
so wrong that I should not be shooting. I had, fortunately, 
not fired off a rifle for at least three years, or I should have 
had great difficulty in dissuading him from effacing himself 
for me, and if I had been at my very best he would have been 
heavens above me in the form he showed. That was the 
sort of man he was. We were in the same house at Chelten- 
ham for two or three years, so I knew him extremely well. 

These chapters in no way exhaust the list of my novelist 
friends — they are merely reminiscences which I thought likely 
to interest readers about some of them. I have not men- 
tioned, for instance, one of my greatest friends, that brilliant 
historical novelist, John Bloundelle-Burton ; or Hornung, 
Doyle's brother-in-law, whom I first met out in Australia 
thirty years ago ; or Richard Pryce, that dainty novelist and 
playwright; and I have passed by many other well-known 
authors whom I knew equally well and saw very often. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS 

One is apt to let fiction speak for itself, as if it represented 
the whole of literature. But it does not. Several of the 
men mentioned below are novelists, but they owe their 
importance more to other books. 

The late W. H. Wilkins, who was much at our house, is 
an example. Wilkins, who was the son and heir of a West 
Country Squire, was an extraordinary mixture — a man of 
fashion, who was at the same time an industrious museum- 
worker. He wrote admirable books on the Georgian Courts. 
But he will be best remembered as the editor to whom Lady 
Burton entrusted her manuscripts for publication. It was 
from him that I learned the irreparable loss which she in- 
flicted on literature by burning a number of Burton's manu- 
scripts because of the grossnesses which they contained. 
There was no reason why any of these grossnesses should 
have been published — the manuscripts could have been 
printed with lacunae where these passages occurred, and the 
manuscripts could have been left to the nation in the British 
Museum on condition that the offending passages never were 
published. But the idea of burning unpublished works 
about Arabia, by the greatest of all explorers of Arabia and 
students of Arab customs, was too infamous. Wilkins put 
it down to her religion. She was a very ardent Roman 
Catholic. 

He had a good deal to do with the Ladies^ Realm in its 
early days, when it was published by Hutchinson, and I 
believe he had a good deal to do with the formation of the 
fortnightly part publications for which this house is famous. 
He certainly was a friend and constant adviser of Hutchin- 
son's. His books enjoyed a considerable sale. The novel 

300 



OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS 301 

he wrote in collaboration with Herbert Vivian was one of the 
last of the three-volumers. 

Wilkins was a man of strong likes and dislikes, very- 
affectionate to his friends. Like E. H. Cooper, he was a 
well-known figure in society as well as in literary circles — 
and, curiously enough, he, too, was lame. 

Joseph Shaylor, the managing secretary of the Whitefriars 
Club, and the managing director of Simpkin, Marshall, 
Hamilton, Kent & Co., the largest wholesale booksellers 
in the world, I have known almost as long. It is interesting 
to note that Shaylor, besides being the largest dealer in 
books commercially, has a most intimate and discriminating 
knowledge of all the books which are worth reading, and 
issues delightful little books on books, including his dear 
little annual From Friend to Friend. 

Every one knows his volume called The Fascination of 
Books. His career is a romance; it reminds one of Dick 
Whittington. He has himself told us that he is a self-made 
man — i. e. he has had nothing but his own intelligence and 
grit to help him. He was born in Stroud in 1844, where he 
was apprenticed to a bookseller named Clark. It was part 
of Shaylor's duty to fetch the London papers from the train 
in the morning. In 1864 he came to London, at once entering 
the firm of Simpkin, Marshall & Co. His diligence and 
business acumen generally was noted, and after a while he 
was given charge of one of the departments. It became 
increasingly evident to his employers that their confidence 
in, and judgment of, this young man from the country had 
not been misplaced, and within five or six years after the 
formation of the company, as it now stands, Shaylor was 
elected to the position of one of the managing directors. 

Shaylor is an authority on the history of books and book- 
selling, and has many interesting stories to tell of how things 
were done in the trade years ago, when life was more leisurely. 
In those golden days, reviewers had some power; a good 
review in The Times sold two hundred thousand copies of 
The Fight at Dame Europa's School, timidly brought out in 
the very smallest way, and an article in The World sold four 
hundred copies of Called Back. How a book sells depends 



302 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

very much upon the original subscription before pubHcation, 
of which Shaylor, as head of the world's biggest buyers, thinks 
it worthy. Of him it may be justly said that he has his finger 
on the pulse of English literature and that his diagnosis is 
accepted by the world. 

Ernest Thompson Seton — who took for his pen-name 
Ernest Seton Thompson — came to us first many years ago, 
when he became engaged to a friend of ours, the beautiful 
Grace Gallatin, daughter of the Speaker of the California 
House of Representatives. A descendant of the last Earl 
of Winton, he went to Canada when he was only five, and 
lived in the backwoods for ten years. Then he went to 
school and college in Canada, and had two years' art-training 
in London before he returned to Manitoba to study natural 
history, eventually becoming naturalist to the Manitoba 
Government. In 1898, when he was thirty-eight years old, 
he published his Wild Animals I have Known — the Biographies 
of Eight Wild Animals, which went through ten editions in 
the first year, and was the foundation of his fame and large 
fortune. He founded the outdoor-life movement, known as 
The Woodcraft Indians, which has a membership of nearly 
a hundred thousand, and in addition to his soundness as a 
naturalist, he is the most dramatic lecturer I have ever 
heard. He lectures on the psychology of wild animals as 
if they were human beings, and is said to be the most popular 
lecturer living. His books about wild animals have delightful 
sketches of animal playfulness and humanness in their 
margins, some of which are by himself, and some by his wife. 

Dr. Dillon, whose articles in the Daily Telegraph on the 
Balkan question during the war formed the most illuminating 
comment on the subject, I have been meeting for years at 
Violet Hunt's. He is an elderly man, who looks more the 
scholar and the recluse than the publicist with his finger 
on the pulse of all Eastern Europe. 

Max Beerbohm, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's brother, is 
recognised as one of the most brilliant wits and intuitive 
critics of the day, as well as our most inspired caricaturist. 
There are few educated people in England who are not 
familiar with his work. I met him first at a dinner of the 
Women Journalists. We were both guests of the Club, and 



OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS 303 

Mrs. T. P. O'Connor, who was in the chair, said to me, " You 
know Max Beerbohm, don't you? " 

I did not know him, though I had always wanted to know 
him, because I was a great admirer of his work and his wit. 
I said, " No, I don't," and was about to add what pleasure 
it would give me, when he took the words out of my mouth by 
saying, " I refuse not to be known by Mr. Douglas Sladen." 
That was our introduction. 

He was in splendid form that night. He and a man with 
an unpronounceable Polish name, who was one of the leading 
foreign journalists in London, were deputed to reply for the 
visitors. The Pole, who spoke very broken English, at 
interminable length, made Max Beerbohm very angry, 
because he hated the idea of speaking to a jaded audience, 
so when at length his colleague sat down, and he rose to 
make his speech, he began, " I, too, am a foreigner. I go 
about in holy terror of the Tariff Reform League." 

The audience recognised that he was really alluding to 
the Aliens Act, and rocked with laughter. 

I remember Mark Twain being similarly annoyed at a dinner 
of the American Society, when he had to speak after a number 
of verbose platitudinarians. He was quite dispirited when 
he rose, and confined himself to a few sentences. After the 
dinner was over, he told me this, and he went on to say, 
" But I was wrong, for the late Sir Henry Brackenbury 
spoke after me, and look what he did with the audience ! 
He took them up in his hand, and moved them to tears 
and laughter, just as he pleased." 

That speech of Sir Henry's certainly was magnificently 
eloquent. It was during, or just after, the South African 
War, and the phrases in which he alluded to the war swept the 
audience, though they were mostly Americans, right off their 
feet; they were as fine as John Bright's immortal allusion 
to hearing the angels' wings in his Crimean War speech. 
I only once heard a finer speech — the sermon preached in 
St. Paul's by the present Archbishop of York, then Bishop 
of Stepney, upon the centenary of Nelson's death. In that 
sermon over and over again the words were flames. There 
is nothing so inspiring as a supreme speech at a supreme 
moment. 



304 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Dr. G. C. Williamson, the art editor of George Bell & 
Sons, is one of the most potent figures in the world of art — 
in fact, there are few branches of art on which he has not 
got any reasonable information at his fingers' tips. He has 
written books which have met with wide acceptation on 
several of them, and has been a great collector and traveller. 

I met him under curious circumstances. We were both, 
though I did not know him then, in St. Peter's, witnessing 
the Jubilee of Leo XIII. On occasions like this in Italy no 
one interferes with the liberty of the sight-seer, and as I 
was not, in the nature of things, likely to see the Jubilee of 
another Pope, and I had to write a description of it, I deter- 
mined to seize whatever opportunity I could for seeing it, 
without any mauvais honte. The cathedral had been so 
packed for the past six hours that it was practically impossible 
to see anything unless you seized some coign of vantage. 
Williamson and I were standing close to one of the great 
piers of the nave, and the base had a projection some feet 
from the ground. I determined to stand on it, but he was 
between me and the pier. He very good-naturedly made 
way for me, and helped me to scramble up, calling out " Viva 
il papa re ! Viva il papa re ! " all the time. I offered, of 
course, to share my giddy eminence with him, turn and turn 
about, but he was a devout Catholic, and though he saw no 
harm in my ambitions, which he furthered so nobly, he was 
quite content to be in the church, and worshipping. He did 
not want to see more than everybody saw without striving, 
when at last it happened — the carrying of the frail old 
Pope on his Sedia Gestatoria, supported on men's shoulders, 
between the snow-white flabella. 

When it was all over, we exchanged cards, and that was 
the beginning of my friendship with the famous art-critic. 

It certainly was about the most impressive sight I ever 
saw — that vast cathedral, packed with a hundred thousand 
human beings, with the nonagenarian Pope dressed in snow- 
white garments borne on his moving throne from the High 
Altar to the Chapel of the Crucifix. 

It is not too much to say that literary London felt a shock 
when it heard that William Sinclair had resigned the Arch- 
deaconry of London which he had held with such conspicuous 



OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS 305 

success for twenty-two years, and retired to a Sussex benefice. 
He had been one of the foremost figures in every London 
function of the time, since the Jubilee of Queen Victoria, 
and he had started Hfe as a Scholar of Balliol and President 
of the Union— the University Debating Society at Oxford. 
Being a bachelor, there was no reason why he should restrict 
himself to dining at home, and, consequently, he was the 
most prominent figure at public dinners, of a patriotic, 
philanthropic or useful character, where he spoke com- 
paratively seldom, considering what a good speaker he is. 
Being a connection of half the Scottish aristocracy — he is 
a cousin of the Lord of the Isles — he was equally conspicuous 
in country-house parties. A constant attendant at the 
functions of the Authors' and other literary clubs, his emin- 
ence as an ecclesiastic and a public man obscured the fact 
that his performances as an author were among the most 
distinguished of those present, for he has a gift of saying 
wise things in epigrammatic form. His magnum opus is a 
book on his own cathedral, and here I may incidentally 
remark that few archdeacons have ever exercised such 
influence on the Dean over the care of the cathedral. His 
great object was to emphasise the voice of St, Paul's as that 
of the nation in its religious aspect, and it was with this view 
that he prevailed on the Dean and Chapter and the Crown 
to install the Imperial Order of St. Michael and St. George 
in the Chapel of the Cathedral where they meet for annual 
commemorations. His loss, also, from the Sunday afternoon 
pulpit of St. Paul's has been distinctly felt. It was one of 
the institutions of London. He was a wise man to retire 
for leisure to write and travel while he was still in his prime. 
Basil Wilberforce, the Archdeacon of Westminster, and 
son of the great Bishop, I came to know because we used to 
meet at dinner at Lady Lindsay's. It was there that I 
heard him declare his firm faith in the Holy Grail — I am 
refering to the vessel which had been discovered a short 
time before at Glastonbury Abbey, and which was believed 
to emanate a luminous aura at night, from time to time. 
The Archdeacon declined the honour of having it left in his 
bedroom at night to test the truth of the allegation, either 
because he thought his emotions might act on his imagina- 

X 



306 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

tion, or because he did not think himself worthy, but I 
understand that it was left in Sir William Crookes', the great 
F.R.S.'s room for three nights without his observing any 
phenomena. 

I remember George Russell — the Rt. Hon. G. W. E. 
Russell, the editor of Matthew Arnold's letters, and Under- 
Secretary for India in Lord Rosebery's Government — who 
was present that night, interposing a jarring note of in- 
credulity, which the Archdeacon very sweetly forgave in an 
old friend. 

Until her prolonged absences from London for ill-health, 
Mrs. Neish, the wife of the Registrar of the Privy Council, 
was, on account of the remarkable rapidity with which she 
made her way in literature as well as for her beauty, a con- 
spicuous figure in London literary society. She made her 
way so quickly because she was a born writer, and mingled 
the witty and the pathetic naturally. She was a daughter 
of Sir Edwin Galsworthy. There is literature in the family. 
She is a first cousin of the great novelist and playwright, 
John Galsworthy. Her husband's father was a Scottish 
laird, who in an inspired moment advanced the capital for 
founding the Dundee Advertiser. She has often done the 
Saturday Westminster and written many nature sketches. 

One of the principal figures in literary society, and one of 
my most valued friends, is M. H. Spielmann, the great art 
critic who discovered and bought the lost Velasquez a year 
or two ago. Spielmann was for seventeen years editor of 
the Magazine of Art, and is an authority on Punch 
and its contributors, as well as on painting and sculpture. 
He is the author of several standard works, and has been 
juror in the Fine Arts' section of innumerable exhibitions. 
He is also a keen politician on the Conservative side, though 
he is the brother-in-law of the Rt. Hon. Herbert Samuel, 
and is an admirable speaker. But you always feel that it is 
not his accomplishments which count in Spielmann, though 
he has so many; it is himself — his shining character, his 
almost feminine gentleness and considerateness, combined 
with unusual firmness and principle. There are few men 
in London who could be so ill spared as Spielmann. 






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CHAPTER XXV 

FRIENDS WHO NEVER CAME TO ADDISON MANSIONS 

I OUGHT to say something here of the interesting people I 
have known, who never happened to come to Addison 
Mansions, for one reason or another. 

Distance prevented the great Dr. Boyd of St. Andrews — 
the famous A.K.H.B., of whom I saw a good deal in the long 
summer I spent at St. Andrews — from coming. Dr. Boyd 
possessed the most crushing powers of repartee of any person 
I ever met. One day, when he was walking with me along 
the street at St. Andrews, which leads down to the links, 
some one presented an American publisher, a partner in a 
famous firm, to him. 

" I am very glad to meet you, Dr. Boyd," said the pub- 
lisher. " I enjoyed your Scenes from Clerical Life so 
much." 

" I did not write that book, sir," said the terrible Doctor. 
" I wrote The Recreations of a Country Parson — and you ought 
to know it, because your firm stole them both." 

I once unconsciously helped him in using this talent, which 
happened in this wise. Dr. Boyd was a reformer as drastic 
as John Knox. The great humanising movement in the 
Scottish Church, which made its services and music so much 
more beautiful and its attitude so much less angular, was 
largely his work, for he was not only one of the most eloquent 
of the notable ministers who worked for it, but he had any 
amount of backbone. An old ultra-Protestant lady, having 
perceived this, paid an evangelist a thousand a year to go 
about Scotland preaching against him. One Sunday he was 
at St. Andrews, on the public space where the inhabitants 
used to practice archery, preaching against Dr. Boyd. His 
preaching was all " limehousing," an appeal to the coarsest 

307 



308 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

prejudice, most banal abuse and derision. It was so ludicrous 
that I took most of it down in longhand, in the intervals when 
he paused for applause, as he did whenever he imagined that 
he was scoring. It so happened that I was having afternoon- 
tea with Dr. Boyd, and that he was preaching in his own 
church that evening. I began to sympathise with him in 
being made the subject of such a persecution. 

" Were you there ? " he asked. I nodded. 

" Do you remember at all what he said? " 

I produced my notes. 

" Do you mind reading them out to me? " he asked, after 
a despairing glance at the writing. I did. He took no 
notes ; but he had an admirable memory, and he evidently 
took it all in, for that evening, without having lowered his 
dignity by being present at the evangelist's attack on him, 
he turned the tables on the offender from his own pulpit, 
with a dissection of his remarks which can only be compared 
to throwing vitriol, though it was all done with beautiful 
polish and observance of form. 

He was never more amusing than when he was sympathis- 
ing about the difficulties which he described Andrew Lang 
as experiencing when he came to St, Andrews. He was such 
a master of innuendo. 

Dr. Boyd wrote his books in handwriting so minute that 
he could get two thousand words on to one foolscap page. 
The firm who always printed them for his publishers had 
large magnifying glasses fitted to the case on which his copy 
was fixed for setting it up. And Dr. Boyd was very proud 
of it. 

One of Dr. Boyd's sons has inherited his power as a writer 
— my friend Charles Boyd, who acted for some time as 
private secretary to Cecil Rhodes in South Africa. 

Sir Charles Dilke, M.P., took a flattering interest in my 
books, and was very friendly in his intercourse with me. 
The most amusing reminiscences I have in connection with 
him are a propos of a dinner at which we were both taken in, 
though I was tco obscure for it to signify in my case. 

A dinner for a high-sounding object was given at Prince's. 
Sixty important public men and leading writers and journal- 



FRIENDS WHO NEVER CAME 309 

ists were invited, and Sir Charles Dilke was asked to respond 
to the toast of the evening. 

His rising to speak was the signal for three great acetylene 
flares to be turned on, which reduced the scores of electric 
lights in the room to looking like the gas jets in the Rich- 
mond railway-station. This was taken as a compliment to 
Sir Charles, though it would have disconcerted any less 
practised speaker. 

When his speech and the other speeches were over, the 
chairman electrified the assemblage by informing them that 
a new sort of gramophone would reproduce for them Tenny- 
son's last words in the voice in which he spoke them. It was 
a most impressive moment. For a few minutes one did not 
realise the colossal impertinence of pretending that there had 
been a phonograph in Tennyson's bedroom on this solemn 
occasion. But, of course, the record might have been pro- 
duced by a man who knew Tennyson's voice well enough to 
imitate it, as certain reciters imitate celebrated actors. We 
did not realise this at the time. The next day the dinner was 
duly reported, with the names of the makers of these wonder- 
ful lamps, and this wonderful phonetic record, and later on 
it transpired that these two parties had paid for the dinner, 
which was only got up to advertise them. 

This is one of the two cleverest pieces of journalism I 
remember. The other happened on the night that King 
Edward died. A great London linen-draping firm had 
an elaborate intelligence system during the well-beloved 
monarch's last illness. They were well served. I happened 
to see the head of the firm about twelve hours before the 
nation was plunged into mourning. 

" You may take it from me," he said, " that his Majesty 
won't live another twenty-four hours." 

As he was in the habit of making impressive statements, 
I discounted what he said. But he was right, and acting on 
his information, he bought up all the available mourning in 
the market, and scored a huge business victory. I met him 
long afterwards, and alluded to the information which he had 
given me. 

" I wasn't the only one who took pains to know," he said. 



310 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

" for that night, at the hour the King died, I was driving 
from the hotel, where I had been dining, to my office, with 
the correspondent of one of the great French newspapers. 
As we passed the Palace, one of the top windows was opened, 
and a person came to it with a lighted candle, and blew it 
out. ' Did you see that ? Do you mind driving me to the 
West Strand post-office ? " said my French friend. ' Why, 
no,' I said ; ' but what do you want to go there for ? ' ' To 
send a cipher-wire to my paper that his Majesty is dead.' 
' Isn't it a great risk ? ' I asked. ' If it was, I would take it. 
But even a good rumour is worth something.' " 

The Frenchman was right, and he won his victory. 
The late Lord Dufferin was another man who was very 
kind to me about my writings. I suppose that they appealed 
to him for the same reason that they appealed to Dilke. 
Both of them were deeply interested in Greater Britain, and 
in travel generally, and I have written books full of enthusiasm 
for travel and the Colonies. 

Lord Dufferin never forgot any one who had served him. 
When his new title forced a new signature on him, he sent 
a new photograph with the Dufferin and Ava signature to 
all his journalist friends, though some of them had passed 
out of his sphere for years. 

He always did the right thing. I remember the late Lord 
Derby beginning a speech at a dinner at Winnipeg at which 
I was present, " As Lord Dufferin, who seems to have left 
nothing unsaid, observed," etc. 

On that same vice-regal progress to the West, I was 
showing Lord Derby some Kodaks I had taken on various 
occasions at which he had been present — crowded functions 
in cities, full-dress rehearsals of Chippeway Indians on the 
war-path, and the like. One print was from a negative 
which I had of these Chippewas, with their necklaces of 
cartridges and their feather head-dresses, taken on the top 
of the massed choirs of Manitoba, singing " God save the 
Queen." Lord Derby begged this photograph from me, 
" That's a photograph of the whole trip," he said. 

He remained surprisingly popular, considering the mala- 
droitnessof one of his aide-de-camps — a delightful Guardsman 



FRIENDS WHO NEVER CAME 311 

who is now dead. I have heard this A.D.C., whom Nature 
had gifted with the most graceful manners, say appalhng 
things. 

At one provincial capital, the mayor gave a ball in Lord 
Derby's honour. I had just been presented to the mayor, 
and was standing quite close to him, when Lord Derby came 
in. When the official presentation was over, Lord Derby, 
who always wished to get on a friendly footing with his hosts, 

asked his A.D.C. in a whisper, " What is the mayor, M ? " 

The Governor-General wished to know if his host bred cattle, 
or ran a timber-mill, or owned a hotel, or what, so that he 
might say the appropriate thing. But the A.D.C. 's reply, 

which, like Lord Derby's "What is the mayor, M ? ", 

was perfectly audible to that functionary, was " Toned- 
down Jew." So much for the entente cordiale at — we will 
call it Medicine Hat. 

At a ball given by Lord Derby, I watched that same 
A.D.C. taking an important politician, whom he should have 
known perfectly well, to introduce him to his own wife, a 
young and pretty woman who considered herself one of the 
lions of Canadian society. The situation struck me as a 
promising one, so I listened to hear what he would say. 

" Mrs. Um," he said; " may I introduce Mr. Um-um to 
you?" She looked up at him with an amused smile, and 
he continued quite blissfully, " He's a stupid old buffer, but 
I'll get you away from him as soon as I can." 



CHAPTER XXVI 

MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 

Considering the number of years which I have devoted 
to travel, I have not met a great many explorers, certainly 
nothing like so many as I should have met if I had been a 
regular attendant at the meetings of the Royal Geographical 
Society. These interest me extremely, but I have an un- 
fortunate habit of going to sleep at lectures, however interest- 
ing I find them, so I shrink from going to them. Otherwise 
I should have joined the society long ago, and been a regular 
attendant. 

The last time I went there was many years ago, when a 
great explorer and mighty hunter had just returned from 
Mashonaland. He read an immensely interesting paper; I 
quite forgot to go to sleep. Among the speakers who fol- 
lowed was a pompous old gentleman, who scourged the 
lecturer with the most inane platitudes, winding up with the 
question, " May I ask the lecturer what he thinks of the 
climate of Mashonaland? " and the explorer replied, " There's 
nothing wrong with the climate of Mashonaland, but it 
isn't the sort of place where you could get drunk and lie all 
night in the gutter, without knowing about it the next 
morning." 

The old gentleman gasped, and so, I think, did the audience, 
but the lecturer seemed quite unconscious that he had done 
anything beyond giving sound advice. 

My friendship with the famous Dr. George Ernest Morrison, 
of Peking, I have described in the chapter on Australians. 
When I was living in Melbourne, I saw a good deal at the 
Melbourne Club of Augustus Gregory, one of the doyens of 
Australian exploration, actually the first, I believe, to accom- 
plish the transcontinental journey successfully. He told 

312 



MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 313 

me that when their supplies ran short, the things they missed 
most in the terrific heat were fat and sugar. When their 
water ran short, they more than once refilled their water- 
bottles by wringing the dew out of their blankets. 

Curiously enough, fat and sugar were the things equally 
most missed by a party of Canadian explorers who were 
engaged one winter in finding the pass by which the Canadian 
Pacific Railway crossed the Rocky Mountains. Their leader, 
who was running a small steamer up from Golden City to 
the source of the Columbia in Lake Windermere, told me 
so, when I was a passenger with him. I had just shot a wild 
goose on a shoal with my Winchester rifle from the deck of 
the steamer, and he had come out of his cabin to see what the 
matter was. 

I had a unique experience at that Canadian Lake Winder- 
mere. I was lying flat on my back in the reedy shallows at 
its edge, enjoying a bath in water above human temperature, 
when a deputation of ranchers waited on me to ask if I would 
act as judge in the annual horse-races for Red Indians, 
which were to be held that afternoon. They had heard that 
an author had come up with the steamer from Golden City, 
and wished to pay me this unique compliment. I protested 
my inexperience in the matter, but dressed and accompanied 
them to a sort of pulpit made of fresh lumber, which I occupied 
while half a dozen races were run on little barebacked horses 
(I wondered if these were mustangs, but did not dare to show 
my ignorance by inquiring) by naked braves and squaws 
in trousers with a feather trimming down the seam. 
As I escaped uninjured, I suppose that my judgments were 
accepted. Colonel Baker, a brother of Valentine and Sir 
Samuel, was one of the deputation. 

In the time of which I am writing, when people came back 
from the wilds, it was the fashion to fete them at the literary 
clubs. In this way I met Captain Lugard, who was fresh 
back from his strenuous efforts in Uganda, and Mr. F. C. 
Selous, when he came back from his pioneer expedition to 
Mashonaland and Matabeleland, which led to their annexa- 
tion, and the foundation of Rhodesia. Selous was the 
greatest hunter that England ever sent to South Africa. 



314 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

For twenty years he made his hving as an elephant-hunter 
and collector of rare natural history specimens, and took 
the chief part in bringing about the annexation of Matabele- 
land. In later days he has taken a great part in the measures 
for preserving the wild animals of Africa by a splendid 
system of game laws, far stricter than our own. 

Of all the author-explorers who came to Addison Mansions, 
I have known none so well as Arnold Henry Savage Landor, 
grandson of the poet Walter Savage Landor. I first met 
Landor at Louise Chandler Moulton's house in Boston, on 
one Sunday night in 1888, when he was twenty years old, 
and I have seen him constantly ever since. While we were 
at Washington, as I have said elsewhere, he was my guest 
for a week. We were at Montreal together one winter season, 
and saw each other nearly every day, and when we got to 
Japan, almost the first person we saw there was Landor. 
We stayed in the same hotel there for months. 

When we first met Landor, he was an artist, who made 
a considerable income by portrait-painting. It was not 
until after we had met in Japan that he went upon his first 
exploring expedition among the Hairy Ainu in the North 
Island of Yezo and the Kuriles. 

After we left Japan, he went across to China, and went 
very far afield in it. But he did not achieve world-wide 
fame until he made his expedition into the Forbidden Land. 
Every one has read of the tortures to which he was subjected 
there, but it is not every one who met him on his way back, 
as we did, when his spine was so injured that he could not sit 
down, and his eyes still had a white film over them from 
being bleared with fire. I knew of his endurance, because 
I had seen him go out in Montreal in an ordinary English over- 
coat and bowler when the thermometer was twenty-five below 
zero ; and I knew of his courage from the fracas he had with 
the New York police when they were breaking the queue 
at the Centenary Ball for people who gave them money to 
get in out of their place, in which he came within an ace of 
being clubbed. 

Landor is always witty. I heard him say to a man who 
was bragging to him about the size of everything in his 



MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 315 

country, " You see, I am so small that I have to come into 
a room twice before any one can see me." 

He is also extremely courageous. I once heard a dispute 
between him and a man of six feet two, whose portrait he 
was painting. While he was painting it, he did a small 
commission for this man's partner, who wanted it in a great 
hurry as a wedding-present. 

" If you work for other people, I won't have the portrait," 
said the giant. 

" You must have it," said Landor. 

" Upon my word as a gentleman, nothing can make me 
have it," said the giant, whose name was B . 

" Mr. B ," said Landor, " nothing could make you 

behave like a gentleman." 

And his courage in taking other risks is just as great. 

Undismayed by his experiences in Thibet, he was back in 
the Himalayas two years afterwards, and reached an altitude 
of 23,490 ft. He was with the Allied troops on their march 
to Peking, and was the first European to enter the Forbidden 
City. He visited four hundred islands in the Philippines in 
a Government steamer, lent him by the United States for 
the purpose. He crossed Africa in the widest part, marching 
8,500 miles to do it, and he crossed South America from 
Rio di Janeiro in Brazil to Lima in Peru, over the great 
central plateau, across the swamps of the Amazon and the 
heights of the Andes, with followers selected from the most 
desperate criminals in the gaols, because they were the only 
Brazilians who would undertake the risk. That last journey 
alone cost him seven thousand pounds. All Mr. Landor's 
books are illustrated with his own paintings and photo- 
graphs. It must be remembered that he was an artist before 
he was an explorer or an author. 

Though he is contemptuous of hardships and semi-starva- 
tion in his explorations, and travels with a lighter equipment 
than any other explorer, he likes luxurious surroundings 
when he is back in civilisation, and lives in a charming flat 
in one of our most luxurious hotels. 

He also has a large estate in Italy, near Empoli and Vinci, 
where he has carried on the wine-growing business very 



316 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

successfully. Landor's mother is an Italian, and he himself 
was born and educated at Florence, where his father, a younger 
son of the celebrated Walter Savage Landor, has always 
lived, and amassed a magnificent collection of works of art. 

It is not generally known that Landor was one of the 
first to take up the invention of aeroplanes. He began long 
before the Wrights, as long ago as 1893, when he succeeded 
in flying a hundred yards, and later he built a more perfected 
machine not unlike the ordinary aeroplanes. But he was 
away, making his celebrated journeys across Africa and 
South America while the invention advanced with such leaps 
and bounds, and he abandoned aviation. 

Landor speaks many languages. He has lectured in 
English, Italian, French, and German, before learned 
societies, and he can speak several other European and 
Oriental languages and many savage dialects. For he has 
travelled all over the world, although the attention of the 
public has been concentrated on the big journeys of explora- 
tion which have formed the subjects of his books. 

Sir H. M. Stanley I only knew after he had retired from 
exploring, and was living at Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. 
I met him through having been a friend of his wife, who, as 
Dorothy Tennant, was a leading figure in the most brilliant 
set in London Society, and in so many altruistic movements. 
I had met her brother, Charles Combe Tennant, when we 
were both at Oxford — he at Balliol and I at Trinity. He 
either proposed me or seconded me, I forget which, for the 
Apollo, my other sponsor being J. E. C. Bodley, who was 
both at Harrow and Balliol with Tennant. Bodley has since 
become a very distinguished literary man. He is perhaps 
the best writer we have upon French Constitutional questions, 
and he was selected by the late King Edward VII to write 
the book on the coronation, which involved a very wide 
knowledge of the British Constitution. 

Lady Stanley wrote a book on London Street Arabs and 
put together and edited an admirable autobiography of her 
famous first husband, whose name she retains. Her sister 
married Frederick Myers of Psychical fame, the greatest 
Cambridge scholar of his generation. 



MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 317 

But it is not only the books she has written, and the 
brilHant intellectual people whom she has gathered around 
her, which constitute her claim to being remembered, for 
she has taken a leading part in the betterment of London. 
She has naturally worked hardest in Lambeth, where she 
became acquainted with the swarming thousands of Surrey 
when Stanley was member for one of the Lambeth Divisions, 
and it was from Lambeth that she drew most of her boy- 
models to make studies for her book illustrations of London 
ragamuffins. 

Isabella Bird — Mrs. Bishop — one of the most famous 
travellers in the East, I met once near Hakone in Japan. 
She was a curious-looking old lady, dressed like a native 
woman, with nothing but rope-sandals, which cost three- 
halfpence a pair, on her feet. We came upon her very 
suddenly, because Norma Lorimer and I had gone in to 
examine the interior of a pretty building made of some light- 
coloured, unpainted wood, into which people seemed to go 
as they pleased. As Miss Lorimer was then not long out of 
her teens, and the building proved to contain naked men and 
women bathing together, only separated by a bamboo floating 
on the top of the steaming pool, we came out much quicker 
than we went in, and almost fell upon Isabella Bird and her 
attendant. 

When we were at Khartum, the Sirdar, Sir Reginald 
Wingate, introduced me to the famous Father Ohrwalder, 
the good old Austrian priest who had made the sensational 
escape from Omdurman twenty years before, and wrote the 
extraordinarily vivid account of his captivity which is one 
of our principal sources of knowledge of life in Omdurman. 
He was then a venerable old man, with a patriarchal beard, 
very frail, and exhausted by conversing for a few minutes, 
but the Austrian Bishop, who spoke excellent English, took 
his place, and we had an interesting conversation. He was 
not, he informed me, allowed to make converts in the northern 
part of the Sudan, where the inhabitants are chiefly Moham- 
medan. I asked him if he made many converts among the 
pagans in the southern part. He said not as many as he 
ought, but I elicited from him that he set his face sternly 



318 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

against polygamy, and the Sirdar's Intelligence officer had 
informed us that one of the favourite forms of investment 
in those provinces was to buy as many wives as you could 
and make them work for you. 

Wingate himself was most kind to us during our visit to 
the Sudan. He placed his three steamers or yachts at our 
disposal, and deputed his Intelligence officer to accompany 
us, whenever he had no actual need of him. 

The late John Ward, F.S.A., I never met on any of his 
journeys to Egypt or the Sudan or Sicily, though we corre- 
sponded for some years. I have found his books most 
valuable. He had a perfect genius for collecting indispens- 
able illustrations, and his books are encyclopaedias of local 
colour. 

The late George Warrington Steevens, the finest corre- 
spondent the Daily Mail ever had — it is said that they paid 
him five thousand a year — a small, pale, delicate-looking 
man, with double eye-glasses, and an alert, rather humorous 
expression, used to come to us at Addison Mansions with 
his wife. She was a good deal older than he was, but he 
always said that she had been the making of his career, which 
came to an untimely end while he was besieged in Ladysmith. 

His conversation was as sparkling as his journalism. I 
remember when we were discussing Kitchener's conquest 
of the Sudan at the Authors' Club one night, telling him 
that Maxwell (now Sir John Maxwell, late commanding the 
Army of Occupation in Egypt), who was one of Kitchener's 
most trusted officers, had been at Cheltenham College with 
me. 

"What sort of man is Maxwell now?" I asked; and he 
answered, " The sort of man you put in charge of a conquered 
town." 

Arthur Weigall, who was Inspector of Monuments in 
Upper Egypt when we were there, came to see us several 
times at Addison Mansions. One hardly expected to find 
a member of the great Kent cricketing family one of the chief 
experts in deciphering Egyptian inscriptions and judging 
their antiquities. Weigall was rather superstitious for so 
great an Egyptologist, though I confess that I should not 



MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 319 

have liked to outrage the dignity of the tomb of a queen at 
Thebes, as he and a house-party he had at his fine mansion 
on the river near Luxor, proposed to do. They got up 
a sort of comedy to be performed in the tomb, and the 
performance was blocked by a series of accidents — sudden 
illness, the breaking of a leg, and so on. 

We had a delightful expedition with him to some of the 
less-known tombs at Thebes. At his house I saw a couple 
of articles he had published in Blackwood's Magazine on 
Aknaton, the heretic Pharaoh, and I think Queen Ti. I saw 
at a glance that, like Sir Frederick Treves, he was a born 
writer, with quite a Pierre Loti feeling for style, and learned, 
to my surprise, that he had not been able to find a publisher 
for two books which he had ready. I gave him a letter of 
introduction to my literary agent, setting forth the circum- 
stances, which resulted in the instant acceptance of both 
books by leading publishers. One of them was his admirable 
Guide to the Antiquities of Upper Egypt. 

Edward Ayrton, a most brilliant young Egyptologist, 
who discovered the famous gold treasure in the tombs of the 
Kings at Thebes, and has since been Government Archaeo- 
logist in Ceylon, we met at his lonely hut among the tombs 
of the Kings. We came upon him the first time, dressed in 
immaculate flannels, as if he was just starting off for a tennis 
match, and playing diavolo. He is young enough to have 
been at St. Paul's with my son. It required a man of strong 
nerve to live where he lived, surrounded by the spirits of 
so many Egyptian monarchs and their great officers, and 
practically at the mercy of any evilly-disposed Arabs. The 
spirits of bygone Egyptians have, above all others, in the 
history of psychical science, manifested their sustained 
interest in human affairs. Ayrton was acting then, not for 
the Government, but for a rich American. 

John Foster Fraser, who was my colleague on To-day, 
though he is so much younger than I am, a remarkably able 
and energetic man, who once went a bicycle tour of nearly 
twenty thousand miles round the earth, and would have gone 
farther if the land had not come to an end, has made many 
long and adventurous journeys through dangerous countries, 



320 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

and has written notable books. The story I hked best about 
his wanderings was that he always used the public tooth- 
brush, provided by a civilised Shah who had been to Europe, 
in the rest-houses of Persia. He certainly added that no 
previous visitor to these rest-houses had ever known what 
the brushes were used for. 

Speaking of teeth, I once knew a dentist who visited Persia. 
Knowing the prestige of the royal family there, he thought 
that his fortune was made, when the Shah and his mother 
ordered sets of false teeth — the Shah's made of pearls, I 
think, and his mother's of diamonds. But next day he was 
overtaken by a crushing blow. The Shah, to prevent false 
teeth from becoming too common, confined their use to the 
royal family, and the poor dentist had to fall back on writing 
novels — it was C. J. Wills. 

This Shah, or another, on his return from a visit to Europe, 
made his entire harem adopt British ballet-girls' skirts. 

This same Shah, when he visited London, asked the 
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to recommend some one 
to show him round the gilded hells of London. The man, 
whose accomplishments thus received official recognition, 
gave great satisfaction, I believe, but as he is still alive, I 
shall not divulge his name, lest he should be overwhelmed 
with overtures from publishers. His mother was a famous 
Society hostess. 

I have known some Arctic and Antarctic explorers. I was, 
as I have mentioned elsewhere, in the chair at the Savage 
Club on the night that we entertained Nansen. Trevor- 
Battye, who afterwards conducted an expedition to Kolguev 
in the Barents Sea, himself, came up to me, asking me to 
introduce him to Nansen. Of course, I had great pleasure 
in doing so. Nansen, who was a tall, wiry man, and looked 
much less at home in his dress-clothes and his Orders than 
in his Arctic furs, looked my friend up and down. The 
latter was a remarkably smart-looking man, and was very 
well dressed. Nansen was not to know that he came of a 
family famed for their strength and endurance in Indian 
frontier warfare, so he said with a smile, which showed the 
wide openings between his teeth in his lower jaw, " If you 
come with me, remember that you won't be able to wash for 



MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 321 

three years " — he meant, of course, after they had got to 
the Arctic regions. Battye, who is a most distinguished 
naturaHst, and a well-known author, was not deterred, but 
Nansen's list was already really full. Battye was editor- 
in-chief of Natural History in the Victoria History of the 
Counties of England. At the Authors' Club, where he was a 
habitue in those days, we used to ask him why he had not 
gone to the North Pole whenever we wanted to get a rise 
out of him. He was a frequent visitor to our house. 

Another Arctic explorer who often came to see us after 
he had got back from his three years in the Arctic circle, was 
Fred Jackson, who conducted the Jackson-Harmsworth 
expedition. Jackson was a very adventurous man. He had 
made an expedition across the Great Tundra Desert, and 
another across Australia, before he went to Franz Josef 
Land. With his swarthy face, bright dark eyes, and general 
air of joie de vive, Fred Jackson looks much more like the 
manager of some great English business concern in the 
Tropics than an Arctic explorer. Yet he was an Arctic 
explorer, and a very hardy one. Everybody remembers 
the photograph of the meeting of Nansen and Jackson in 
the Arctic circle— Nansen swaddled to the chin in the fur 
clothes of his kind, Jackson showing a starched English 
collar, a proper tie, and a triangle of shirt-front. 

Back from the Arctic circle, Jackson volunteered for 
South Africa, distinguished himself, won medals, and became 
a captain in the Manchester Regiment — Hac arte Pollux. 

We often had with us I. N. Ford, whose advent to England 
as correspondent of the New York Tribune was practically 
the beginning of the entente cordiale between Great Britain 
and the United States. His predecessor, the well-known 
G. W. Smalley, had been very much spoiled in English society, 
but he never set himself whole-heartedly to produce hearty 
relations between the two countries any more than Harold 
Frederic did in his correspondenting in the New York Times. 
The Tribune, had, in fact, been frequently in open hostility 
to England — so open that I heard the following conversation 
at a dinner-party in Washington in the year 1889 at Colonel 
John Hay's. General Harrison had just been elected Presi- 
dent of the United States, and the moderate Republicans 



322 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

made no secret of the fact that they would have Hked to see 
Colonel John Hay, who had been Abraham Lincoln's private 
secretary, Harrison's Secretary of State. His character stood 
as high as any one's in America; no man since George 
Washington had been so fit to be President of the United 
States ; for he was as clear-headed and able and unwavering 
as he was honourable, and his immense private wealth set 
him above temptation. But it was that very wealth which 
prevented him from being nominated. Americans are 
determined that wealth shall not command the Presidency 
as it has the Senate. 

Well, that night Savage Landor and I and a number of 
leading American politicians — the men who were to form 
Harrison's Cabinet were most of them there — were dining 
with Hay at his palatial mansion, built in a heavy-browed 
sort of Spanish-Moresco style by the celebrated Richardson. 
The new President's private secretary, a commercialish little 
Englishman, had promised to come, and he kept us waiting 
so long that finally we went in to dinner without him, half- 
an-hour late. 

At last he made his appearance, breathless, and, upsetting 
a water-bottle as he took his seat, blurted out, " Whitelaw 
Reid " (then editor and proprietor of the Tribune) " has been 
moving heaven and earth to get the Court of St. James' " 
{i. e. the post of American Minister to England), " but the 
President won't give it him. He's afraid that England will 
refuse to receive him because of the way in which the Tribune 
has behaved." 

A good many years later he achieved the goal of his 
ambition, for 1. N. Ford had come to England in the interval, 
and had made the Tribune to America what the London 
Times is to England in the matter of foreign politics. Ford 
had won distinction earlier as an author writing on travel 
in Central America. 

Another man who did a lot of spade-work in promoting 
the entente cordiale was John Morgan Richards, who has lived 
in England for many years, and has more than once been 
President of the American Society of London. American 
from his backbone to his finger-tips, John Richards had a 
fine Quaker sense of justice and peace on earth which made 



MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 323 

the eagle lie down with the lion like a couple of Iambs 
wherever he was present. His brilliant daughter, Mrs. Craigie 
— better known in literature as John Oliver Hobbes — was a 
potent link between the two countries. 

Both he and his converse, G. R. Parkin, the Canadian, 
who was the real father of Imperial Federation, and who is 
now usefully and congenially employed in managing the 
Rhodes Scholarship Fund, were often at our house. G. R. 
Parkin and Gilbert Parker, another Canadian, were some- 
times confused with each other in those days, by people who 
did not know them personally. 

Canada has sent us a lot of good men. Beckles Willson, 
who lives in the old mansion in Kent which was the birth- 
place of General Wolfe, the conqueror of Canada, has poured 
out a stream of information about Canada in a most attractive 
form. Who does not remember the elder Pitt asking Wolfe, 
a boy of thirty-three, to dinner just after he had appointed 
him to command the military in Canada? Wolfe got very 
drunk, and for a moment Pitt feared that he had made a 
mistake. But he remembered how the boy had behaved 
under fire in that descent on the Breton coast, and let him 
go to Canada without misgivings. 

I have known Seton Watson, the Perthshire Laird who has 
done so much for the Slav population of Hungary, since he 
was a small boy. When at New College, Oxford, he showed 
his future bent by winning the Stanhope — the University 
Prize for an historical essay. His first work, after he went 
down, was to translate Gregorovius's Tombs of the Popes. 
But he soon began to give his attention to Hungary, where 
he has travelled a great deal, and took up the cause of the 
Slav races who are being oppressed by the Magyars. He 
held a successful exhibition of their art in London a year or 
two ago. 

Another friend of mine who has done similar good 
work is Campbell Mackellar. He, however, has chiefly 
devoted himself to the Balkans, and in Montenegro no English- 
man is so well known and beloved. At his hospitable table 
I have met some of the leading representatives of the Balkan 
States who came to England during the war. 

Connected both by property and family with Australia, his 



324 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

book-writing has been chiefly about Austraha, and it was 
he who wrote the description of the Adam Lindsay Gordon 
country in South Austraha which appears in the book I 
wrote with Miss Humphris about Adam Lindsay Gordon and 
His Friends in England and Australia. Mackellar has hke- 
wise done a good deal for the recognition of AustraUan Art in 
London — a fact commemorated in an album of original 
sketches presented to him by the Austrahan artists who are 
over here. 

It was no mere accident which made Miss Humphris and 
myself collaborate in Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends 
in England and Australia. It was true that we were strangers 
when she wrote to ask me to collaborate, but we brought 
common traditions to bear on the book. In Cheltenham, 
where Gordon spent his boyhood, Miss Humphris lives, and 
I was six years at the College. Gordon was a College boy, 
and his father was a College master. Miss Humphris could 
not be at the College, as I was, but her grandfather was the 
architect who built its principal buildings. Like Gordon, 
both Miss Humphris and I went to Australia, and we spent 
years there, though not so many as he did, and as a connec- 
tion of one of Australia's greatest racing men — the famous 
Etienne de Mestre — it was natural that she should take an 
absorbing interest in the steeplechasing exploits of Adam 
Lindsay Gordon. 

Edith Humphris has an extraordinary power of collecting 
and sifting materials for a book. Off her own bat, she 
collected all the facts of Gordon's early life at Cheltenham 
and Prestbury. The grist which I brought to the mill, 
besides a study of Gordon's life in Australia and his poems, 
which I had blocked out more than thirty years before, when 
I tried to get Cassell's to undertake its publication, was the 
mass of material put at my disposal by people who had known 
him in the flesh, and treasured remembrances and keep- 
sakes of him. Miss Humphris knew that the letters to Charley 
Walker existed; I tracked their owner down and got per- 
mission to reproduce them. Henry Gyles Turner, who gave 
me leave to use all the materials in Turner and Sutherland, 
was a friend of mine in Australia. George Riddoch, who 
gave us all the Riddoch poems and reminiscences, is a friend 




f 



SIR GILBERT PARKER 

Drawn by Yoshio Markino 



MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 325 

of mine, introduced by old friends in Australia. Lambton 
Mount, Gordon's partner on the West Australian Station 
(brother of Harry Mount), is a friend of mine, and gave me 
all his information orally. General Strange, who was 
Gordon's friend at Woolwich, and wrote about him in Gunner 
Jingo's Jubilee, is an old, old friend of mine, Frederick 
Vaughan and Sir Frank Madden and Mrs. Lauder wrote 
their reminiscences for me, as did Campbell Mackellar of the 
Gordon country in South Australia. And John Bulloch, 
the editor of the Graphic, who wrote the wonderfully interest- 
ing pedigrees and chapters about Gordon's family, wrote 
them for me. 

But Miss Humphris wrote all her part of the book, includ- 
ing a great deal about Gordon in Australia, herself, from 
studies which she had been making since she was a child. 

Talking of Australia, at one time I saw a good deal of 
Basil Thomson, the son of the great Archbishop of York, who 
in those days was an author, but is now secretary of the 
Prison Commission, after having been governor of Dartmoor 
and Wormwood Scrubbs prisons. 

Thomson, when I first knew him, had just come back 
from being Prime Minister of the Tonga Islands. I asked 
why he gave it up. He said that things were no longer what 
they had been in Government circles in Tonga ; when he was 
there, even the Government could only raise the wind by 
having fresh issues of postage stamps manufactured for them 
by stamp-dealers in England, who paid for the privilege of 
selling the stamps in England without accounting for them 
to the Government of Tonga. But in the palmy days of 
Tonga it was very different. Then, a Prime Minister, who 
was also a Nonconformist missionary, procured the monopoly 
of selling trousers from the King of Tonga, before he induced 
the king to make the whole population turn Christian, and 
make it illegal to appear without trousers. 

You sometimes hear people say, " What would you do if 
you were on a desert island? " I once came very near 
seeing life on a desert island — it was in a little settlement of 
less than a dozen families, on an island adjoining the main- 
land on a desolate coast of Asia. It had a Consul. 

" It seems an awfully dead and alive hole," I said to him. 



326 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

"It is not so bad as it looks," he replied. " We have a 
splendid rule here; as there is no kind of amusement in the 
place, except making love, we passed a resolution that no 
one should get in a temper over the infidelity of a spouse. 
We manage our loves like other people manage their friend- 
ships — if a woman likes to have an affair with another 
woman's husband, it is nobody's concern but hers and his. 
Since we have made this arrangement, this has been the 
happiest place in the world, though we live on a mud bank, 
without even a tennis-court. Before this golden age began, 
the quarrelling was awful. Two men simply could not get 
out of each other's way, and they felt obliged to resort to 
violence to maintain their self-respect, though they might not 
value the affection they were losing so much as an old glove." 
I forget the profession of the Solon to whom the community 
owed this up-to-date method of law-giving. 

Fred Villiers, the war-correspondent, was making his way 
across Canada at the same time as we were, on a lecture tour. 
He had a number of wonderful battle-slides, and he looked 
highly picturesque in his service kit. He had also a splendid 
advance agent, whom I will only call by his Christian name, 
because he was the son of an English bishop, and had very 
distinguished connections. Henry never forgot his dignity, 
and even in the wilds of the North- West always wore a tall 
silk hat, with its fur worn thin by constant brushing, because 
he was Villiers' agent. 

We had run across him at many C.P.R. capitals before he 
came to our rescue at a woe-begone place called Kamloops 
in British Columbia. We arrived there after midnight, and 
proceeded to the hotel, which should have been expecting us, 
as it was the only train in the day from Montreal. We found 
the hotel open, but absolutely deserted. We could have 
helped ourselves to anything we liked in the bar, and taken 
our choice of the bedrooms. At that moment appeared 
Henry, who asked us what we would like to drink, and told 
us the Kamloops charges for it. He then took us round, 
and gave us our choice of bedrooms, and when we wanted to 
know why he had suddenly become landlord, told us that the 
landlord had just died, and the Irish servants were afraid 
to be in the house with a corpse. 



MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 327 

We slept the night there, and paid our bills to Henry in 
the morning. Norma Lorimer, who was with us, had a room 
which smelt horribly of disinfectants. Henry said that the 
dentist, who came up once a week from Seattle, had used 
that room as his surgery the day before, but the inhabitants 
said that the corpse was there. 

This was nothing to an experience of Lewis Clarke, a 
son of the celebrated Marcus Clarke, who wrote For the Term 
of his Natural Life, and edited the first complete edition 
of Adam Lindsay Gordon's poems — a man who has had an 
extraordinarily adventurous life. This happened to him, 
I think, in the wilds of New Guinea. He had gone to sleep 
under a tree. During the night there came on a violent wind, 
and he was awakened by something cold and heavy, which 
kept brushing his face. Whatever it was, it only just 
touched him, and when he brushed it away, yielded lightly 
to his touch. After pushing it away for a while, he came to 
the conclusion that it did not matter, and got to sleep again. 
In the morning he was awakened by an awful stench, and 
when he opened his eyes to see what it was, found the bare 
toes of a dead Chinaman, who had hanged himself, knocking 
against his nose. 

When I was at Canton, I went to visit our Consul-General 
there. I was with him in his office one day when he was 
trying a case. An Englishman had gone out shooting, and 
a Chinaman had sent his children after him, with instructions 
to get into the line of fire and be shot, which duly happened. 
The affectionate father then brought an action against the 
Englishman for damages occasioned to him by the injuries 
to his children. It was perfectly plain that the children 
had had themselves shot on purpose, but to my utter surprise 
the Consul made the Englishman pay. 

When the parties had left the room, I reproached him with 
the miscarriage of justice. His only reply was, " I know it, 
my dear fellow, as well as you do; but I have been Consul 
here for thirty years (I forget exactly how many he said), and 
it is impossible for me to conceive any circumstances under 
which the British Government would support me." 

I may add that he was much loved and respected by the 
British community, whom he was unable to protect. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

MY ACTOR FRIENDS 

Since I came back to London a score of years ago, I have 
known at least a hundred actors and actresses, but they did 
not all visit us at Addison Mansions — some, whom I knew 
quite well, never could summon up the energy to go as far 
west as West Kensington. Actors like to live right in the 
centre of things, or right out in country air. There is quite 
a colony of them at Maidenhead; Maxine Elliot lives near 
Watford, in the Manor House which belonged to my uncle 
Joseph, and Edward Terry had a house at Barnes, which is 
now sublimed into Ranelagh Parade. 

Among our chief actor-friends were the Grossmiths. 
Weedon Grossmith, with his pretty wife, came constantly. 
That diffident manner of his hides brilliant abilities. We 
are apt to forget that besides being one of the finest comedians 
of the day, he was once a regular exhibitor at the Royal 
Academy (which furnished him with the subject for a farce). 
What has made Weedon so " immense " is his absence of 
mauvais honte. He has dared to play the humiliating parts, 
of which he is the finest living exponent, with perfect sin- 
cerity. He has often said to me, " Why don't you write me 
a play, Douglas? If you make me a bally enough little 
fool, I'll take it; if you make me a big enough coward, I'll 
take it ; if you make me a bad enough cad, I'll take it. It is 
my art to put this kind of character into the pillory." And 
so it is; there is no one who can excel him in depicting the 
ignoble, foreign as it is to his own character. 

His brother George, with his wife and daughters and his 
son Lawrence — George the younger had already flitted from 
the paternal nest, and was earning forty pounds a week — 
were also constant visitors. Lawrence was always the mirror 
of smartness. I think he was very bored with that sort of 
party, but he adorned it. 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 329 

Geegee, as he loved to call himself, was full of frolic. 
He could make light of anything. He made light of the 
a\vful play in which he appeared, which was written for the 
mistress of a millionaire. The author was given five thousand 
pounds to write a play and put it on the stage. The only 
condition was that the millionaire's mistress should be on 
the stage the whole time, and have nothing to say. 

He was once the cause of my seeing the finest piece of 
acting off the stage which I ever saw. One of our greatest 
living actors is always chaffed about his penchant for duchesses. 
Grossmith and I were having supper together by ourselves 
at his party at the Grafton Galleries. Presently we saw the 
great actor standing beside us, and Grossmith, without 
bothering about his being within earshot, said, " We'll ask 

to sit down and have some supper with us; when he's 

been there about two minutes, he'll look at his watch, and say 
that he must leave us because he promised to be at the 
duchess's in a quarter of an hour." 

The great man sat down and attacked a mayonnaise vigor- 
ously. Presently he looked at his watch, and made an 
elaborate and rather snobbish apology to Grossmith for having 

to leave, but he had promised the Duchess of d, etc., 

and all the time he was making it, trod on my foot till I 
nearly yelled. Then he got up and left us, pausing to speak 
to some one a few yards off to have the satisfaction of hearing 
Grossmith's " There, didn't I tell you ! " 

Fred Terry, the " manliest actor on the stage," and his 
beautiful wife, Julia Neilson, used to come and see us some- 
times. I met them first at Hayden Coffin's, where she was 
filling the room and the garden with her glorious singing 
one summer dawn. When she rose from the piano, she made 
several vain efforts to get Terry away; he was telling Coffin, 
myself, and one or two others, some of his experiences. 
When she came back the third time, he said, " My wife always 
has a devil of a trouble to make me put on my dress-clothes, 
but when I have once got them on, I never want to go home." 

That night, a rather shy little man, very alert and intelli- 
gent-looking, had given us a recitation of his own which was 
so breathlessly witty, that the audience could not seize all 
the points. Coffin introduced him as " a very clever friend 



330 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

of mine, Mr. Huntley Wright," and his name meant nothing 
to the audience. A year later they would have stood on the 
mantelpiece to get a better view of the king of musical 
comedians. Both he and his sister Haidee, that brilliant 
character-actress, used to come to Addison Mansions in those 
days. That the Coffins should do so was natural, because I 
had known Charles Hayden Coffin since he was a boy at school 
and I was a man at Oxford. He and his sisters and I and 
my sisters used to skate together at Lillie Bridge. His father 
was the leading American dentist of London, and Coffin him- 
self was a dentist, or, at all events, in training for it, for 
several years. But he had such a glorious voice that it was 
inevitable that he should find his way to the musical stage, 
and have the longest reign on record as a jeune premier. 
He thrilled London with his " Queen of My Heart To-night." 
He has deserved his success twice over — both on account of his 
singing, and for the way in which he has helped others ; no one 
has done more for the beginners in his own profession, and for 
helping unknown composers of ability to get a hearing. There 
are many people quite famous now whom I heard before they 
were known to fame at all, at his charming cottage, that rus 
in urbe on Campden Hill, which has the same initials as himself 
— C. H. C, Campden Hill Cottage, Charles Hayden Coffin. 

With Julia Neilson I should have mentioned her handsome 
cousin, Lily Hanbury, who was, till her premature death, one 
of the beauties of the London stage. She came often to us. 

It is natural, in connection with her, to think of Constance 
Collier, now Mrs. Julian L'Estrange, who filled her place, and 
has gone so much farther, for she has not only personal 
attraction, but real power. She was, as all the world knows, 
leading lady at His Majesty's before she went to America, 
but all the world does not know that she is the most accom- 
plished tango-dancer on the stage. 

There is no more attractive figure on the stage than Ben 
Webster. Young as he is, he found time to be a barrister 
before he began his long succession of leading parts, and 
though he is one of the least stagey actors on the stage, he 
was born in its purple. He is a grandson of Ben Webster I., 
who had a claim to fame besides his acting which has long 
since been forgotten, for he was the founder of the great 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 331 

Queen newspaper, which he sold to Sergeant Cox — strange 
godfathers for the Queen, the Lady's Newspaper. Sergeant 
Cox was the uncle, not the father, of Horace Cox, who was 
at the head of the Field, the Queen, and the Law Times for 
most of the last half century. Webster married an actress, 
May Whitty, so well known, not only for her acting, but for 
her activity in woman movements. They were very often at 
Addison Mansions, and among the strongest supporters of 
our Argonauts Club. 

Lena Ashwell we have known better than any other great 
actress, because we came to know her family long before she 
went on the stage, through her sister, Mrs. Keefer, wife of 
the engineer who built the famous bridge over Niagara. 
In those days she was studying at the Royal Academy of 
Music, and she is an F.R.A.M. She has a singularly beautiful 
voice for singing as well as speaking. Conscious of the 
burning dramatic temperament which won her her fame in 
the impersonation of the heroine in Mrs. Dane's Defence, 
she has always cast her eyes on the stage. When she was 
only fourteen she spoiled a chicken she was cooking by 
forgetting to remove the insides because she was so enthralled 
with reading King John. In intensity she is unsurpassed by 
any actress on the stage. She is really as good in tender 
parts as in grim parts, but she is less known in them, though 
every one should remember how delightful she was in The 
Darling of the Gods. 

Lena Ashwell enjoys the almost unique distinction of having 
been born on a British man-of-war, the fine old ship which 
did duty under Nelson, and was the Wellesley training- 
ship till she was accidentally burnt a few months ago. Her 
father was a captain in the Nav}^ 

Having been brought up in Canada on the St. Lawrence, 
she is a wonderful canoeist. Her grace on the water used to 
be the theme of the frequenters of Cookham Reach. 

Her brother, Roger Pocock, has written the best novels 
of the Canadian North-West. They are descendants of the 
famous traveller, and had a great-great-uncle, Nicholas 
Pocock, the sea-painter who painted Nelson's Battle of the 
Nile and Lord Howe's Glorious First of June. Another 
ancestor wrote farces in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. 



332 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

Lena Ashwell owns the Kingsway Theatre, and has pro- 
duced some notable successes there, in which she showed her 
determination to give brilliant beginners — whether actors or 
dramatists — a chance. But since 1908, when she married 
Dr. Simson of Grosvenor Street, she has chiefly given herself 
up to feminist and benevolent movements — the chief of which 
was the founding of the Three Arts' Club for young actresses, 
musicians, and painters to make their home as well as their 
club. The Three Arts' Club has an excellent magazine of 
its own, and confers the various advantages of an Institute 
on its members. She is also a prominent worker for the 
Suffrage Movement. 

One of the earliest of our actor friends, and one of our 
most frequent visitors, was James Welch, who first came 
with his brother-in-law, Le Gallienne. He had given up 
chartered-accounting for the stage for five or six years before 
we knew him. But a good many years more had to pass 
before he came into his own as the genius of farce, though 
he played with real power and success in several of Ibsen's 
plays, and Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses. It 
was in Mr. Hopkinson, in 1905, after he had been on the stage 
for eighteen years, that he became an idol of the public, 
and was enabled to go into management. 

Ever since then he has been enormously successful, and 
in spite of it, has remained the same simple, impulsive, 
unspoiled person as ever. He used often, as I have told in 
another chapter, to go to the Authors' Club with me. 

One night not long since, when I was chatting with him 
in his dressing-room at the theatre, and was asking him when 
he could have another game of golf, he said, " I don't know, 
I'm sure. I have contracts with cinema-film photographers 
for seven thousand pounds, and I don't see how the devil 
I am going to get them all in." 

I felt quite oppressed with the unfairness of things, for I 
had known this same man when he was just as brilliant an 
actor, eating his head off with chagrin at not being able to 
get an engagement (of which I am sure he was badly in need 
pecuniarily), and now here were photographers and film- 
makers tumbling over each other in their anxiety to take him 
in his inimitable fooling in When Knights zvere Bold, or his 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 333 

misery and stupefaction in his great condemned cell-scene from 

the Coliseum. 

Welch is quite a decent golfer — down to 8, I think, 
though the time was when I had to give him 8. He is 
also a remarkably good spinner of golf stories. I tell him 
that whenever he is hard up for a curtain-raiser, he could 
easily hold a house for half-an-hour with his golf-stories. 

One of his favourites is about his caddie at Aberdeen, 
to whom he gave two seats to see him in When Knights were 
Bold. Next day on the links, he asked the man how he 
liked it. 

" My wife laughed," said the cautious Scot. 

" And what did you think of it? " 

" Oh, I ? Now tell me, mon, do you make a guid thing 
of it?" 

" I do pretty well." 

" Ye do? " said the caddie. " Then my advice to ye is, 
to drop golf — ye'll never make a living at that." 

Mrs. Welch is a daughter of Lottie Venne, one of the best 
women comedians we ever had on the English stage — a 
frequent visitor to us at one time, as was that fine actress, 
Fanny Brough (Mrs. Boleyn), an eminent member of an 
eminent family, whom we first met at an Idler tea. 

At the Idler, too, we met the Beringers, of whom we saw 
a good deal at that time — Mrs. Oscar Beringer, the play- 
wright, and her daughters Esme and Vera, who were both 
on the stage. Vera, the younger, has followed in her mother's 
footsteps, and written plays — one with Morley Roberts. Esme, 
who is very popular both as a woman and an actress, has 
played in a large number of parts with an unvarying success. 

We knew Beatrice (Robbie) Ferrar much better than 
either of her sisters, though all three came to our at-homes, 
just as they were all three on the stage. Though she had been 
on the stage six years when we met her, she still looked a 
mere child. She was for years one of the best inginue 
actresses (for which her pretty, small features, bright colour- 
ing and demure expression, gave her natural advantages) 
on the stage. She was one of the most familiar figures at 
the Idler functions. 

Rowena Jerome, who has scored several successes in her 



334 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

father's plays, was only a little child, playing horses, re- 
markably clever and precocious, in the days when we were 
going to the Idler teas and Jerome's house in the Alpha 
Road, St. John's Wood. 

Among other actors and actresses we met at the Idler teas 
or at Jerome's were Ian (Forbes) Robertson and his wife, 
and their daughter, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson, Nina Bouci- 
cault, the Henry Arthur Jones's, Kate and Mary Rorke, Olga 
Nethersole, George Hawtrey, Lindo and Phyllis Broughton. 
I saw Phyllis Broughton the other day, looking absolutely 
the same as the very first time she ever came to our flat, 
twenty years ago, the gentlest-faced actress I ever met. 

Forbes-Robertson's brother, Ian Robertson (who never 
used the name of Forbes himself, though his pretty daughter 
Beatrice resumed it when she went on the stage), came to 
us less frequently than his wife and daughter, who were 
habituees. 

ig^Mrs. Robertson was a daughter of an old friend of mine, 
that remarkable man Joe Knight, who always seemed to 
me as if he ought to have been Henty's brother. As dramatic 
critic of three leading newspapers, the Athenceum, the Globe, 
and I forget the other, he had almost as much power to make 
and unmake as Clement Scott had. He used his influence 
most generously. At the same time he was a scholar of 
omniscience; he performed the Herculean task of editing 
Notes and Queries for the proprietors of the Athenceum ; and 
he had a daughter so good-looking and charming that I 
always thought of her as Romola when I thought of her with 
him. I have no doubt that before she married Ian Robertson 
she had made herself as useful to the scholar as Romola. 

Their daughter, Beatrice, has made a distinguished name 
for herself on the American stage. 

It was an odd thing that I should not have met (Sir J.) 
Forbes-Robertson at Jerome's, considering how much they 
have done since to make each other's fortunes in the Third 
Floor Back, for which Jerome, as he always does when I 
am in England, sent me stalls on one of the opening nights. 
But, as a matter of fact, I met Forbes-Robertson at Palermo 
in the Venetian palace which Joshua Whitaker, the head of 
the great Marsala wine-firm, built for himself, adjoining the 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 335 

old Ingham house in the Via Bara. Forbes-Robertson was 
staying there, and I am in and out of the Whitakers most 
days when I am in Palermo. He was convalescing from a 
severe illness, and we went about, the little which he could 
manage, together in Sicily, and afterwards for a whole week 
together in Venice. 

He was, I remember, very tickled with one trip which he 
took in Sicily when he got stronger. A nephew who lives 
in England, but has very large possessions in Sicily, came 
out to stay with the Whitakers. They wished him to visit 
his various properties in the interior when he was there. 
But the thing did not interest him; he was a subaltern in 
the Guards, taken up with much more important thoughts. 
But he was an ardent admirer of Forbes-Robertson on the 
stage, and he was willing to go wherever his uncle desired 
if Forbes-Robertson would go with him. 

Forbes-Robertson was eager to oblige his hosts, and 
captivated with the manner of the expedition, for, as they 
were going into brigandy parts of the island, and the person 
of a great landowner is the favourite prey of the brigand, 
they had to have an escort, and sit with loaded revolvers on 
their knees. 

Everything passed off happily, and Forbes-Robertson 
came back with the knowledge that an orchard in which 
pistachio trees bear freely is as good as a gold-mine. 

In Venice he was quite well again, and spent all day in 
letting us show him the artist's bits of Venice, for there was 
a time when, like another of our leading actors, he expected 
to make his living as a painter, not as an actor. He was 
educated at the Royal Academy till he was twenty-one, 
after leaving the Charterhouse, where he was four years the 
senior of Baden-Powell. 

He was especially delighted with the gondola expeditions 
we made to the back canals of Venice. One day it would 
be along by the lagoon, where the timber-rafts lie floating, 
and collect weeds and local colour, past the ruining abbey 
of the Misericordia and Tintoretto's Church, S. Maria del 
Orto, to Tintoretto's house, now woefully humiliated by 
being a " tenement," but unrepaired and unaltered since 
that prince of painters lived and worked in it. It may easily 



336 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

be found, since it is near the Camel sign of a mediaeval Moorish 
merchant. Another day it would be across the Giudecca, 
where the big Adriatic fishing-boats, with figures of saints 
and monsters on their scarlet and orange sails lie anchored, 
generally with their sails flapping against their masts, as 
if they knew that they were there for ornament to the land- 
scape. Across the Giudecca there was the famous Redentore 
Church, with its three far-famed Madonnas by the pupils of 
Bellini, and there was more than one house with that rarity 
for Venice — a garden. 

Over the other side of the Giudecca we all went into the 
great old garden of some Marchese. Venice has gardens 
there, but the Venetians are so unused to gardens that they 
abandon them to dull evergreens, when, having nothing to 
overshadow them, they might be as full of gay flowers as a 
sarcophagus in Raphael's pictures of the Resurrection. The 
only person I know who does make use of his garden chances 
is Dr. Robertson, the Presbyterian Minister, who wrote that 
wonderful book. The Bible of St. Mark's. 

I think Forbes-Robertson enjoyed the visit to Tintoretto's 
house best of all. The well-head in the court was untouched 
except by the soft fingers of three centuries ; the studio, with 
its open timber roof and huge fireplace, had nothing about 
it to distract the eye from memories, for it was a bare tene- 
ment of the poor. And it was such a very little way from 
S. Maria del Orto, a name made classic to the British public 
by the robbery of one of the most precious Madonnas of 
John Bellini — Santa Maria del Orto, which contains a frescoed 
choir by Tintoretto, and his " Presentation in the Temple," 
and his tomb. When we were looking at the immortal 
Venetian pictures in the Accademia and the Doge's Palace, 
or studying the faded marbles which jewel the interior of 
St. Mark, he was so overcome with reverence that it seemed 
almost a pain to him. He had not, I think, been in Venice 
before. At all events, he did not know it as I did — I could 
take him to any point of interest in the city by a few minutes' 
walk, and perhaps crossing the Grand Canal by a traghetto. 
I have written half a book about Venice, and some of my best 
writing is about it. I do not know why I never finished it. 

Henry Arthur Jones's family I have known since they 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 337 

were children. Mrs. Jones used to come to our parties before 
the eldest of her children was out of the schoolroom, and we 
spent one summer in the same house at Ostend, so we have 
watched the elder girls coming to the front on the stage with 
interest. Of the great dramatist himself I have spoken 
elsewhere. If he had chosen, he could have been equally 
famous as a writer of books. He has a profound mind, and 
a popular method of statement. 

Olga Nethersole could not come in the evenings to our 
at-homes, because she was generally acting, but she came for 
long talks in the afternoons. I found her remarkable, not 
only as an actress of a singularly emotional type, but from 
the interest which she takes in the social problems of the day, 
such as criminology and emigration. A year ago, at a party 
given by the C. N. Williamsons at the Savoy, when we were 
comparing notes on the Canadian North- West, from which 
she had just returned, and which I knew twenty years ago, 
I was much struck by her grasp of the subject. 

I cannot remember whether it was at the Idler or at " John 
Strange Winter's " that I first met Martin Harvey, who, like 
Forbes-Robertson, is a painter in his leisure moments. He 
was with Irving in those days, recognised already as the 
most capable all-round actor in the company, and for his 
wonderful conscientiousness and finish. Harvey had the 
good sense to bide his time, and when he did launch on his 
own account in The Only Way, which Frederick Lang- 
bridge, the poet, dramatised in collaboration from Dickens's 
Tale of Two Cities, he made an instantaneous and gigantic 
success. In the days when he used to come to us, he was 
singularly boyish-looking, and delightfully modest about 
his powers, though all his friends knew that he was a genius. 

It was certainly " John Strange Winter " who introduced 
us to Mary Ansell, at that time one of the twin stars of 
Barrie's first play. Walker, London. 

It may have been Mary Ansell, who was noted for her 
beauty, who introduced us to the other star of the play, 
Irene Vanbrugh, equally noted for her prettiness and her 
archness, who continues to this day to interpret the whimsi- 
calities of Barrie with such delightful espieglerie. She was a 
Miss Barnes, daughter of a Prebendary of Exeter — there were 



338 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

four daughters living with their mother in Earl's Court Road. 
Violet, the eldest, and Irene, the youngest, then unmarried, 
were on the stage, Angela was a violinist or violoncellist — 
I never remember which of these instruments my friends 
play — and Edith, the fair one of the family, frowned on the 
stage, and married somebody of importance in India. Angela 
came to us oftenest. A little later Violet Vanbrugh married 
Arthur Bourchier, whom I had met long before when he 
was at Christchurch, Oxford, and the leading light of the 
Oxford A.D.C., of which Alan MacKinnon, an old friend of 
mine at Trinity, who introduced us, was another leading 
light. 

Bourchier, the inimitable, is, I fancy, the only professional 
Shakesperian actor who could have the chance of taking the 
part of one of his own family in Shakespeare. For Cardinal 
Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, is a character in 
Shakespeare's Richard III. He was also Henry VI's 
Chancellor, as Sir Robert de Bourchier was to Edward III 
in 1340 — the first of the lay-Chancellors of England. 

The first time I saw Bourchier act was when he was an 
undergraduate at Oxford — the part was Harry Hotspur, 
and he was superb in it, because this was a part in which he 
could use his art and his personality in equal proportions. 
Since then I have seen him blend his two great qualifications 
of character-acting and potent personality, in many parts, 
in Henry VIII pre-eminently, and I have seen him exercise 
the two qualifications separately in many parts, now as an 
old seventeenth-century Bishop, overflowing with goodness, 
now as a bluff, practical joker in boisterous farce with 
Weedon Grossmith. He is certainly one of the finest actors 
on the stage, when you consider him from the double stand- 
point of his tremendous personality, and his power to disguise 
it in parts entirely foreign to one's idea of Bourchier. I 
cannot help liking him best as himself on the stage, because 
to me there is nothing so interesting as personality, and he 
has such an inexhaustible flow of wit and high spirits. 

If Bourchier had had no success on the professional stage, 
his name would have been immortalised in its annals, for 
it was he who persuaded Jowett, of Balliol, the then Vice- 
Chancellor of Oxford, to abolish the statute of the University 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 339 

against Oxford having a theatre, and he actually enlisted 
Jowett's services into raising the money for building one. 

When I first went to Oxford, we had no theatre on account 
of the famous statute. Our ancestors regarded actors as 
" rogues and vagabonds," and only a year ago a well-known 
actor got off serving on a jury on the grounds that he was 
legally a rogue. But though the town might not have a 
theatre, it might have as many low music-halls as it liked, 
because the University did not consider what went on in 
" the halls " as acting at all. The real point at issue — 
would the ladies of a caste like Irving's or Tree's be as likely 
to tempt the St. Anthonys of Oxford out of their hermitages 
in the deserts of learning — was entirely lost sight of. 

With Bourchier one naturally thinks of Aubrey Smith, 
who had to play Sir Marcus Ordeyne in Bourchier's theatre — 
Smith, who was the chief light of the Cambridge A.D.C., and 
the crack Cambridge bowler of his time in the 'Varsity matches. 

Smith's beautiful sister, Mrs. Cosmo Hamilton, who 
latinised her name into Faber when she went on the stage — 
she told me so herself — was only just coming into her own 
when she died — cut off in her very flower. There was no 
more genuinely liked and esteemed woman on the stage. 

Granville Barker, the typical clever, red-headed boy, 
though he was not then old enough to have been promoted to 
dress-clothes, used to come with an extremely intelligent and 
charming mother, the mother of a large family, I always 
understood, though she looked far too young. They were 
brought by Edwin Waud, the artist, as far as I remember, and 
they were friends of Gleeson White's. Granville was a very 
bright boy when you spoke to him, but he was never much in 
evidence; he left his mother, so that she might enjoy herself, 
instead of having to keep him amused. He may have gone 
to the sandwiches and lemonade in the dining-room — more 
probably, he was not allowed to smoke, and went to do that. 

I fancy that Acton Bond, who now runs the British 
Empire Shakespeare Society, must have been a friend of 
Gleeson White's, because he came into our life so very early. 
Bond was an institution in Bohemia. He was a singularly 
handsome and distinguished-looking actor, who took Shake- 
speare and other " costume " parts. He was one of the 



340 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

most courteous men I ever met, and I knew that I could 
confer pleasure on anybody by introducing Bond. This was 
an important consideration to a host who made a point of 
keeping all his guests introduced and amused for all the 
evening. Bond knew all the denizens in Bohemia, and had 
a fund of conversation about them, in addition to being 
personally very interesting ; and, as a fair golfer, a good man 
in a boat, a good dancer, and so on, was a " find " for a 
country house. Even when he was acting most, his heart 
inclined to the other side of his profession — to training people 
for the stage and running the Actors' Association — a sort 
of Union for Actors. He did an immense amount of useful 
work. He married the charming Eve Tame comparatively 
lately. A tall man, with a graceful figure, he carried himself 
extremely well, and, with his fine classical head, perpetuated 
the tradition of the Kembles. 

Ray Rockman was one of our Argonaut friends, and became 
a very intimate friend indeed. She stayed with us at Sal- 
combe and elsewhere, besides being constantly at our house. 
With her tall, slight, aristocratic figure, the face of a marquise 
of Louis XV's court, and her wonderful Oriental eyes, she 
had the presence of the greatest tragediennes who have adorned 
our stage. When you see her in a drawing-room, you think 
instinctively of Sarah Bernhardt's great parts, and rightly, 
because she was Sarah's understudy in them in Paris before 
she came to England. If any actor-manager had wanted 
a leading lady for tragedy, she would have been one of the 
most famous actresses on our stage to-day, for she had the 
divine fire. But London does not run to tragedies, except 
for the glorification of an actor- or actress -manager, so she 
had to descend to being the villainess of melodramas generally 
finishing up with suicide in the last act. In the Great Ruby 
she showed her real dramatic power. But she has never had 
the chance of becoming the leading lady at one of our chief 
theatres like His Majesty's, where she could have taken 
London by storm with her magnificent presence and carriage 
and the passion she can put into her acting with her marvellous 
Oriental eyes and coal-black hair. These she owes to her 
being a South Russian. I am not sure whether she was born 
in Russia or the United States, where her father is a doctor 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 341 

in Montana — a friend of the Copper King. If any one were 
to make a play out of Sarah Siddons, Ray Rockman would 
be the ideal actress to cast for the leading part. 

It was Ray who introduced me to the wonderful Annie 
Russell, the most temperamental of American actresses. I 
say American, though she was born in Liverpool, because 
practically all her work has been done on the other side, and 
it was Ray who introduced me to Sarah Bernhardt. Un- 
fortunately, Sarah does not like talking English, and I am 
not equal to saying anything very interesting in French, 
though I read it with facility, and know plenty of " kitchen " 
French for use at hotels and railway-stations. Sarah sent 
me seats to see her in Hamlet, which she pronounced " ome- 
lette." I found it rather wearisome, to be quite honest, 
because I hear French so badly, and when I went down to see 
Ray and her in her dressing-room at the end of the first act, I 
gladly accepted her invitation to spend the rest of the evening 
in her dressing-room, " if I could not follow her easily." 

It was extremely interesting to watch her dressing, and 
she did not take any more notice of my presence than if I 
had been a fly, while she was actually being got ready for 
the stage, though she made herself extremely pleasant during 
the acts when she was off the stage. She could divest 
herself of the personality of Hamlet, and resume it at a 
moment's notice. Ray speaks French as well as English, 
so everything was quite simple, with her there to interpret. 
During the longest interval a message came down for her 
that the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward VII) was 
in the house, and Sarah went off to see him for a long time ; 
it seemed like half-an-hour. She invited me to go with Ray 
to visit her at that wonderful rock island off the Breton 
coast, but for some reason or other I did not make the effort. 
I think I had made arrangements to go to St. Andrews. 

Elizabeth Robins I met at the Idler. One always thought 
of her as the actress in those days, and not, as one now thinks 
of her, as the novelist. Elizabeth Robins is a tall, spare, 
Western woman, with a very eloquent face. She is the 
greatest Ibsen actress we have had in England. She had 
the unusual courage, for the stage, to think that good looks 
and elegance in dress were of no consequence, when she was 



342 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

presenting Ibsen's characters. Her one desire was to fulfil 
his conception exactly, and she did it most convincingly. 

A few people, like myself, knew that she was the " C. E. 
Raimond " who wrote George Mandeville's Husband for that 
series of Heinemann's, but we imagined it to be a passing 
phase with her, instead of the prelude to a series of great 
novels on burning questions. 

I do not know who brought Gertrude Kingston to us first, 
but she often came. She was the accomplished violinist 
mentioned in Lord Roberts' dispatch of September 13, 1901, 
as having rendered special service during the war in South 
Africa. Mrs. Silver, for this is her real name, is an authoress 
as well as an artist and a collector, as I discovered when we 
were going over the old things in Phillimore Lodge together 
before the sale. 

Alice Skipworth was a lovely woman with a gorgeous 
voice, whose fortunes on the stage were made in an extra- 
ordinary way. An actor-manager engaged her without any 
experience of acting to understudy his wife, who financed 
his plays, in an American tour. When they got to Phila- 
delphia, I think it was, on the second night his wife took 
ill, and Mrs. Skipworth duly took her place. Philadelphia 
went wild over her beauty and her voice, and the actor- 
manager found himself in the unpleasant predicament of 
having to decide whether he would close his doors, or persuade 
his wife to let Mrs. Skipworth go on taking her place. His 
wife, who was, I believe, very charming herself, was a sensible 
woman, and thought it would be better to coin money by 
doing nothing than to bankrupt herself by acting, so the 
understudy acted and sang throughout the tour, and came 
back a leading lady in musical comedy. She was a very 
clever woman; she could have written an excellent novel 
about Bohemian life; she had the knowledge; and she was 
both witty and epigrammatic. 

I need not explain who Murray Carson is. He was a very 
great light in those circles, because he was an actor-manager, 
and as such had the distinction of giving Lena Ashwell one 
of her first chances in Gloriana. In addition to his successes 
as an actor and a manager, he was joint author with Louis 
Napoleon Parker in that delightful play Rosemary, since 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 343 

which he has written many plays. He is quite a well-known 
figure at various literary clubs, noted for his remarkable 
resemblance to the first Napoleon. The collaboration of 
these two Napoleons was, I imagine, a mere coincidence. 

My last meeting with Decima Moore I am never likely to 
forget. She was very fond of watching polo, and we were 
sitting together in the pavilion at a club to which I belong, 
when a man was thrown from his pony, and dragged along 
the ground for several yards on his face, his nose ploughing 
a regular furrow till it was broken. I went down to where he 
was lying. Every one thought he was killed, because he lay 
insensible for so long. When he did come to, he said, " Is 
my nose broken, doctor ? " The doctor said it was, and then 
he said, in my hearing, " Then I hope you will make a better 
job of it than God did," which seemed to me the most extra- 
ordinary piece of sang-froid for a man who, the moment 
before, had been almost across the threshold of life and death. 

Sir Charles Wyndham, whose real name I cannot for the 
moment remember, and " Mary Moore," I have seen chiefly on 
the Riviera at Cimiez. I make it the excuse for my forget- 
fulness that he forgot what he was forgetting once, when, 
coming up cordially to shake hands with me, he said, " I 
remember your name quite well, but I can't recall your face." 

Wyndham fought in the war between North and South 
in the United States, and he was a member of the company of 
John Wilkes Booth, the actor, at the time that the latter 
assassinated President Lincoln in the theatre ; I have never 
heard if he was actually on the stage at the time. He was 
brought up, I understood, as a doctor. 

As an instance of Wyndham's lapses of memory, I may 
quote that one day at Ranelagh he asked me if I was a 
member of the Club. I said " Yes.'? " Can I telephone from 
here?" " Oh, yes." 

When we got to the telephone, he began turning up the 
name of his man of business, who had a name, which I will 
not mention, as ordinary as Skinner ; there might have been 
a couple of score of the name in the telephone book. He 
read down the list. " I can't remember his initials," he said. 
I looked at him as if to say, " Don't you often see him? " 
He caught my eye. His actor's intuition told him my 



344 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

thoughts. " I know what you're thinking," he said. " Yes, 
I do 'phone to him every day, but I can't for the Hfe of me 
tell which of all this lot he is." 

Irving once told me at lunch a story which he probably 
told many others. He was touring in the United States, 
and staying either at St. Louis or Cincinnatti. One morning 
at breakfast a large rat ran across the room. As he had 
been up till past five that morning, being entertained by the 
local Savage Club — I forget its name — he was feeling rather 
cheap, and gave a little start. " You needn't mind him, 
Mis' Irving," said the negro waiter; " he's a real one." 

The Trees I have known for a long time. It is an undiluted 
pleasure to meet Tree out at lunch — like all actors, he affects 
lunches more than dinners. There are few men so witty. 
When most of the great actors and actresses were exhausting 
their powers of polished vituperation on the unhappy Clement 
Scott for his generalisations upon the morals of the stage, 
Tree's reply as to what he thought of the matter was, that 
nothing Clement Scott had said made him think any less of 
him, and Lady Tree's rejoinder to the late W. T. Stead is 
historical. 

Cyril Maude always gives me his smile when we meet at a 
certain polo club, and often " passes the time of day " to 
me very pleasantly. But I know that he is another of the 
people who remember your name, when they meet you, but 
cannot recall your face. Still, I forgive him for the sake of 
that Major in The Second in Command. His charming wife, 
Winifred Emery, whose triumph I saw the night she won 
her place in the first rank as Marguerite in Irving' s Faust — she 
was the understudy — always remembers my face as well as my 
name. There never was an actress on our stage who showed 
more spirit, unless it is Lena Ashwell turning on a bully, for 
Lena turns to bay like the lion " on that famed Picard field." 

The Maudes' daughter is now rapidly coming to the front. I 
saw her as one of Portia's ladies in the Merchant of Venice look- 
ing (intentionally, I suppose) for all the world like the exquisite 
Tornabuoni heiress in the choir frescoes of Santa Maria Novella 
at Florence, and could hardly believe that it was the same 
merry, everyday girl that I meet at the Adrian Ross's. 

Edward Terry I first met at the Savage, where he was one 




SIR HERBERT BEERBOHM-TREE 
Front the drawing by Yoshio ATarkino 



MY ACTOR FRIENDS 345 

of the most influential members, and afterwards at Barnes, 
where he had a dear old house near the church, which has 
been improved away to make room for a sweet-shop and a 
garage and an auctioneer's lair. Though he was so capable 
in the chair, and such an excellent comedian, I don't remember 
his ever saying anything worth remembering when we 
walked or " bussed " down Castelnau together. 

Penley I never met in private life; I only met him at 
the Savage, where he never would do a turn, and where his 
dignity — not assumed — when he was in the chair was as funny 
as Charley's Aunt, and proceedings were conducted in the 
voice of the curate in The Private Secretary. 

I first met Mrs. — and Mr. — Patrick Campbell at a party 
at Oswald Crawfurd's in the very early 'nineties. She had 
been enjoying triumphs in the provinces for some years, but 
London was for the first time being thrilled by that mar- 
vellously seductive voice, that languorous grace, and that 
panther-like personality, which is sleek till it springs. Of 
all actresses, Mrs. Campbell is most closely connected with 
Kensington, for she was born in the Forest House, Kensington 
Gardens, and lives no farther off than Kensington Square, 
where she occupies one of the old houses on the west side. 

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray at one end of her career in 
London, and Bella-Donna at the other, established the fact 
that for parts in which the infidelity of a wife brings in 
passion and intrigue of tragic proportions, she has few equals on 
the stage of any country. It is the Italian side of her nature 
coming out — her mother was a Miss Romanini. Indeed, one 
can picture her at her very finest in an Italian mediasval play 
— such as the scene where his beautiful mother mourns over 
the body of the terrible young Griffonetto Baglioni. 

Like Lena Ashwell and Julia Neilson, Mrs. Campbell (Mrs. 
George Cornwallis West) might have expected to make her 
name by music. 

She supplies one more illustration of the siren voice of Africa, 
which never ceases to call to those who have once listened to 
it. For Patrick Campbell made his work in Africa, and died 
there in the Boer War, and now their daughter Stella, who had 
made her mark on the stage with her Princess Clementina in 
Mason's play, has married and gone to live at Nairobi. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

MY ARTIST FRIENDS 

My first connection witli artists came through my cousin, 
David Wilkie Wynfield, who was the nephew and godson of 
the great Sir David Wilkie. He was a popular artist in both 
senses of the word, for engravers used to multiply his pictures 
Hke " The New Curate," and there was no more popular 
figure at the Arts' Club or in the homes of his brother artists. 
A repartee of his was the origin of the picture in Punch, where 
a painter who wants to know why he does not get into the 
Royal Academy is told that he should not wear such thick 
boots. He and some brother artists, of whom I think Marcus 
Stone and G. A. Storey are the only survivors, took Ann 
Boleyn's castle of Hever (when, if not abandoned to the owls 
and bats, it had not yet become the home of the Astors), as 
a summer sketching-box, and I have a picture of them grouped 
round the entrance arch, which he painted. 

So that he might have a better opportunity of introducing 
me to all his friends, he put me up for " The Arts," of which 
I remained a member till his death. In those days it was 
located in a delightful old house in Hanover Square, which 
had belonged to and been frescoed by Angelica Kauffmann. 
There I made the acquaintance of the most famous artists 
of the day, both painters and sculptors, for your artist, unlike 
your author, loves to go to the club at night to relieve his 
mind after his long day's work, by playing pool or demolishing 
the claims of his rivals to be considered artists in long technical 
conversations through clouds of smoke. The art of blowing 
smoke-rings is a speciality of artists. I have heard a famous 
R.A. recommend a young painter, who was complaining 
that he could never get his pictures into the Royal Academy, 
to paint small grey pictures. " Why ? " asked the disappointed 
aspirant. " Because they are the pictures which Leighton 

346 



MY ARTIST FRIENDS 347 

needs to show off his own pictures properly, and he always 
picks them out first." 

Another time, at the committee meeting when Herbert 
Schmaltz was up for election, the chairman asked, " Does 
anybody know anything about Mr. Schmaltz?" and the 
most popular landscape painter of the day replied, " Mr. 
Schmaltz is a man who has taken the illustration of the Bible 
into his own hands." 

It was Wynfield who introduced me to Joe Jopling. There 
have been few at-homes more popular than Mrs. Jopling- 
Rowe's. Jopling, who was a great rifle-shot — he won the 
Queen's Prize at Wimbledon — as well as a regular exhibitor 
in the Academy, died a few years after I came to know them, 
and his widow married George Rowe. Mrs. Jopling-Rowe, 
who is a popular and admirable portrait-painter, and a 
constant exhibitor at all the principal picture-shows, like the 
Academy and the Salon, when first I knew her lived at Beau- 
fort Street, Chelsea, but an epidemic of burglars drove her 
from there to Pembroke Road, Earl's Court, and from thence 
to an old house in Pembroke Gardens. It made no difference 
to her at-homes, which have always been crowded with really 
distinguished people, for she has known all the leading artists, 
most of the leading authors and actors, and not a few of the 
leading public men and women of her time. Millais painted 
her portrait in her youthful prime, and if one sees her standing 
near it, where it hangs in her house, one notices how little 
she has altered in those intervening years, which have been 
so full of painting triumphs and brilliant society. 

Many artists used to come to Addison Mansions. West 
Kensington is not like St. John's Wood or Chelsea; there 
was no West Kensington Arts' Club, and artists had not 
many meeting-places except Phil May's studio and our flat. 
Solomon, already nearing his zenith, used often to come 
with his brother Albert, and so did Arthur Hacker, though 
they both lived some way off. We were asked to Solomon's 
wedding — we and Henry Arthur Jones, I think, were the only 
Gentiles present at this splendid ceremony, carried out with 
all the historical rites. Albert Solomon very good-naturedly 
sat with us to tell us the significance of everything. It was 
as interesting as an Easter service in a Sicilian cathedral. 



348 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

It was easier for J. J. Shannon, for he Hved quite close, 
in Holland Park Road, in an old farm-house, which he gradu- 
ally transformed into a charming mansion, where one used to 
meet most interesting people. 

David Murray, the famous landscape painter, was another 
frequent visitor among the Academicians, very popular for 
his wit and camaraderie, very ready to help any one who 
needed a push in high quarters. 

He has altered surprisingly little — only last summer I met 
him at a ball at Sir St. Clair Thompson's, the eminent throat 
specialist's, whom I knew as far back as 1886 when he was 
honorary secretary of the Club at Florence. David was 
dancing as much as most of the young men, and not looking 
perceptibly older than when I met him a quarter of a century 
ago. He is another of the intellectual artists who read 
deeply, and he is much interested in Japan. He very good- 
naturedly came to advise me about my pictures when I was 
selling the contents of Phillimore Lodge, but we had already 
parted with the celebrated Nattier of Louis XV dressed as 
Hercules — a Burke heirloom — my father sold that to Colnaghi 
for £1500. 

Alfred Drury, that delightfully poetical sculptor, was another 
Academician who came often. Drury has a beautiful voice. 

It was only in our last days at Addison Mansions, after 
we had given up those large evening at-homes, that William 
Nicholson, not an Academician, but one of the greatest artists 
of them all, came. Nicholson was not only one of the finest 
painters of the day in inspiration and technique, but was the 
pioneer of a new movement, being the first painter to have an 
artificial reproduction of daylight installed in his studio — 
a costly and highly scientific combination of various lights. 
By means of this painting is rendered independent of the 
weather and the time. He has painted all night before now. 
Mark Barr, a scientific friend of ours, who devised the 
apparatus for this, the most brilliant man I ever met, brought 
him. 

Another pioneer of art who used to come to Addison 
Mansions often, when he had a studio in Brook Green, was 
Francis Bate, the moving spirit of the New English Art Club. 
His influence on art has been profound. The new English 



MY ARTIST FRIENDS 3|49 

Art Club may have been identified with a certain extravagant 
phase by scoffers, but it has embraced men hke Sargent 
and Shannon, as well as apostles of stiff blue cabbages. 

The public were quick to appreciate the charm of the soft 
grey studies, in which so little was indicated and so much 
implied, of Theodore Roussel and Paul Maitland. Maitland, 
in spite of his delicate health, was a student as well as a 
painter. He was a very clear thinker, like the late Sir Alfred 
East, another Academician who often joined our symposia. 
I always felt that East could have made his name as easily 
in literature as in art. 

The artist who has played the greatest part in the book life 
of his time is, of course, Walter Crane, a really profound 
student and thinker, who has held all sorts of most important 
directorships in art, and delivered lectures of historical 
importance. No artist has such a record in Who's Who, 
for Crane is not only an illustrator of books, but a writer, 
and as eminent a socialist as he is an artist. He describes 
himself as " mostly self-taught," but he was apprenticed to 
W. J. Linton, and exhibited in the Royal Academy when he 
was only sixteen. He lives in ideal surroundings, in a rambling 
house, more than two centuries old, in Holland Street, 
Kensington. The thing which always struck me more than 
the old curios which find such a fitting niche in the house, are 
the rubbings of the brasses of his ancestors, for Crane has 
a long line of knightly ancestors, one of whom was Chancellor 
of England in Stuart times. Of his work I need not speak, 
for he has founded one of the schools of modern English Art. 

When I asked Walter Crane if he had been turned into an 
artist by any sensational incident, he said — 

" My progress — if I may so call it — has been very gradual 
and quite unsensational, I think — except to myself. I had 
the great advantage of having an artist for a father, and never 
remember the time when I did not handle a pencil of some 
kind, though it was often a slate pencil. I had no early 
struggles to have my wish to be an artist allowed and en- 
couraged, or any strife about the realisation of that ideal 
with a bourgeois-minded family, as one so often hears about 
in artists' histories. I never started for anywhere with half- 
a-crown in my pocket — anything of the sort usually quickly 



350 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

burnt a hole in what little pocket I may have had — and no 
doubt that is the principal reason why I remain poor. 

" My early fondness for drawing animals caused confident 
and friendly critics to say, ' He will be a second Landseer ! ' 
and nothing could have had a more glowing prospect for me 
at the time ; but times have a way of changing, and ideals 
change with them, especially when one is ' growing up.' 

" At the age of sixteen I had what might be called my first 
picture accepted at the Royal Academy — first time of asking 
— but the subject was ' The Lady of Shalott,' and my source 
of inspiration was by no means Landseer, but rather the 
pre-Raphaelites, and I was already deeply read in Ruskin. 

" You speak of the ' paradox of my being a sociaHst ' in 
spite of my descent. Why should it be a paradox for one 
who loves beauty and harmony, and strives to realise it in 
his work, but who sees around him a world scrambling for 
money, glutted with riches at one end of the social scale, 
and penniless and destitute at the other, while all the time 
the bounty of Nature and the invention and labour of man 
provides abundance — but only for those who can exchange 
the necessary counters, and for those who hold the keys of 
the means of the maintenance of life ? 

" Sociahsm does not mean lowering the standard of life, 
but raising it, and with the abolition of the struggle for mere 
bread, and the substitution of co-operation for competition, 
it will be possible to build a society founded upon some better 
basis than cash, a surplus value. Lideed, it may be said 
that a true aristocracy might then become possible, since 
personal qualities and character would then have their real 
value, purged of the harrowing, selfish burden of private 
ownership of the means of life, and estimated by service to 
the community." 

My most intimate artist friend is Rene de I'Hopital, who, 
in spite of his name and his descent, speaks not a word of 
French. De I'Hopital is one of those happy portrait-painters 
who can get a likeness ; but he is more than that ; if he had 
a literary turn, he could write as good a book as any one on 
" collecting " economically, for he has a wonderful knowledge 
of old furniture and its West-end and East-end values. I 
know the extent of his knowledge because he and my brother- 



MY ARTIST FRIENDS 351 

in-law, the late Frederick Robert Ellis, were my advisers 
when I sold the contents of Phillimore Lodge, and the auc- 
tioneer said they fetched half as much again as they were 
worth, because we knew their value and their points were so 
well brought out. De I'Hopital owed his knowledge partly to 
the fact that he was born in a great old house full of treasures. 
Having known what it was to struggle himself, when he became 
an artist against the wishes of his family, he does a great deal 
for the poor. 

De I'Hopital, who is a French count, son of the sixth Duke 
de Vitry, has had the honour of painting Prince Arthur of 
Connaught and Pope Leo XIII, and was a Gold Staff officer 
at the coronation of King George V. He married a daughter 
of John Francis Bentley, the great architect who built the 
Westminster Cathedral. Mrs. de I'Hopital has written a book 
entitled The Westminster Cathedral and its Architect, and 
collaborated with me in one of my books in which she would 
not allow her name to appear. 

Two painters who used to come to Addison Mansions arise 
in my mind with East. Both were portrait-painters, recog- 
nised as among the soundest executants of their craft — J. H. 
Lorimer and Hugh de Trafford Glazebrook — for both were 
interested in literature as well as art — a not common trait 
among artists — and both of them paint portraits with endur- 
ing and outstanding merit. Lorimer, as I have said, was the 
son of the late Prof. Lorimer of Edinburgh University, the 
eminent international jurist who made the restoration of 
Kellie Castle his hobby, and brother of Sir Robert Lorimer, 
who restored St. Giles' Cathedral at Edinburgh, and a cousin 
of Norma Lorimer, the novelist. Glazebrook was a brother 
of Canon Glazebrook, late head master of Clifton, an Oxford 
friend of mine who never won the high jump, though he could 
clear five feet eleven, because he happened to have for a con- 
temporary the only man who ever cleared six feet in the 
'Varsity sports. 

A new school of black-and-white artists was coming rapidly 
to the fore. Pictorial journalism on an unprecedented scale 
had invaded England from America, and a number of new 
illustrated papers and magazines had started, and they relied 
for their pictorial side on ideas which must have seemed 



352 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

revolutionary to those who had been brought up on the old 
standard productions of the Illustrated London News. The 
foundation of The Graphic a decade or two earlier had been 
a sign of the times. 

The most extraordinary artist of the movement could 
hardly be called a journalist proper, because most of his 
work was done for books published by John Lane, and for the 
Yellow Book. Beardsley, who was a mere boy, with his 
boyishness accentuated by his fair hair and consumptive's 
pink-and-white complexion, came nearly every week with a 
very pretty sister who made her name rapidly on the stage. 
Beardsley, who had a workmanship of spiderish delicacy 
and an imagination like Edgar Allan Poe, which resulted 
in the creation of female types of appalling wickedness and 
snake-like fascination, did not talk much "shop"; he was 
more occupied with the studies on which these extraordinary 
creations were founded. He was a very interesting man to 
talk to, very modest. He always impressed me as a man with 
a wonderful future if he were not cut off, as he was, by an 
early death. 

Phil May, another genius of the movement, was one of our 
most constant visitors. He lived, as I have said, in a studio 
improvised from a stable, almost opposite Shannon, in those 
days. He did more than most men to revolutionise black 
and white, because he was one of the first who grasped the 
value of Japanese effects and introduced them into his work. 
But his method of producing these Japanese effects was not 
Japanese. A Japanese artist fills the brush, which he uses 
as pen and pencil, with Indian ink, and secures his effects 
with a few dexterous sweeps. Phil May drew his picture in 
the English way with comparatively few lines, then studied 
his own work to see what was superfluous, and rubbed out 
every superfluity. He was not the rapid worker which one 
imagined from his style. After he left the Australian paper 
with which he was connected, he remained a free lance for 
years, drawing whatever came into his head as irresistible, 
and selling it to one or other journal, and bringing out collec- 
tions of his drawings of the year in his famous annual. It was, 
perhaps, not the best way of making money, but it came very 
naturally to him, for he was as brilliant a wit as he was an 



fiv 



MY ARTIST FRIENDS 353 

artist. He was a man of inspirations ; he could be irresistibly 
funny with such simple materials as the henpecked husband. 
He was the reverse of henpecked himself. He had a devoted 
and very pretty wife, who was forgiving to all the faults 
he committed in his bland and childlike way, and I often 
used to think that his jokes about henpecked husbands formed 
his way of crying " peccavi." Who that had ever seen it 
could forget his picture of the husband coming home at three 
o'clock in the morning and being asked, " What do you mean 
by coming home at this time of night? " and pleading that 
there was nowhere else open ? Or his picture of the drunken 
lion-tamer, who had taken refuge from his wife in the lion's 
cage, with his wife outside the cage crying " You coward ! " 

I do not think he ever made his speech in the rooms of the 
Piscatorial Society the subject of a picture, but it was worth 
it. He was the guest of the evening and had dined a little 
too well — at any rate, as far as drink was concerned. When 
he rose to respond to the toast of his health, he looked round 
the room and saw dozens of glass cases stuffed with salmon 
and pike of monstrous size, the pride of the Society. He took 
them all in with a wave of his hand, and said, " I suppose 

you will tell me that there is only one y kipper on that 

wall ! " 

On another occasion I was with Phil and Corbould at the 
Savage Club. We stayed there very late, and when Phil 
finally made up his mind to go home, he could not remember 
where he lived. Of course, we knew his own studio quite 
well, because it was close to our homes, and we had been there 
scores of times, but he was not residing there ; he was staying 
in lodgings, for he had just come back from the Japan fiasco. 
He had received a commission from the Graphic to go to 
Japan for a year or more, and do sketches for them. They 
offered him very liberal terms, and he accepted them. He 
let his studio for a year, and started off full of good intentions. 
But he never got to Japan. He stopped somewhere on the 
way — a very long way from England — and abandoned him- 
self to a lotus life of mild dissipation — we might, perhaps, 
have called him a lotus-drinker — and the Graphic had to 
bring him home again. It was soon after he got home that 
this event at the Savage happened. 

A A 



354 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

" Where to ? " asked the cabby. 

" I don't know," said Phil. " I have forgotten where I 
live ; it is not my own house." 

" Well, how am I to get you there? " asked the cabby. 

" I do not know what the name of the house is," said Phil ; 
" but I think I could draw it." 

" There are a good lot of houses in London," said the cabby, 
" and they are mostly all alike." 

" But there is a church near it," said Phil ; " and I could 
draw that." 

A menu card and a pencil were procured, and he drew a 
picture of the ordinary London house and a rather toyshop 
church. The cabby looked at it and said, " I know where it 
is; that's Osnaburgh Terrace," so Phil got into the cab, and 
then the cabby turned round to Corbould and myself and said, 
" That's Phil May, ain't it ? " We said yes, and he unbuttoned 
his coat and put the menu card carefully in his pocket, 
remarking, " It will be worth something some day." 

The extraordinary thing was that any one who was so 
witty and such a consummate artist should have been ignored 
by Punch for so many years, though he became in the end one 
of its most honoured contributors. The editor approached 
him in a very curious way when he felt that he could not ignore 
him any longer. He did it through the firm who at that time 
reproduced illustrations for Punch. 

Phil May was one of the best-hearted of men, generous to a 
fault, alike with his money and in his attitude to his rivals. 

Very famous people used to come sometimes to those 
ultra-Bohemian gatherings in his studio, including some of 
the Queens of the music-hall stage. 

It was Phil May, I believe, who drew the inimitable cartoon 
in the St. Stephen's Review of Mr. Gladstone, with a male- 
volent eye, gathering primroses on the banks of the Thames 
on the anniversary of his illustrious rival's death, which had 
for its title — 

" A primrose by the river's brim, 

A yellow primrose was to him, 

And it was nothing more." 

The cartoon was received with universal acclaim, but the 
general public — quorum pars fui — did not bother as to who 



MY ARTIST FRIENDS 355 

the artist was. I did not know Phil at the time. He was 
just back from AustraHa, where he had been working for the 
Sydney Bulletin. 

Phil May had the head of a mediaeval jester, and was fond 
of drawing himself in the cap and bells. 

Another black-and-white humorist of a different type who 
was with us just as much was Dudley Hardy, whose satirical 
sketches of ballet girls and their admirers filled the periodicals 
of the day, obscuring Dudley Hardy's claim as an artist. 
He was a son of the well-known marine painter, T. B. Hardy, 
and was lured from doing the really admirable work with which 
his friends are familiar, by the fatal popularity of his theatrical 
caricatures. It was long before he could make up his mind 
to break away from that and do himself justice in painting. 
His sister married a very great friend of ours, a water-colour 
painter of extraordinary cleverness and charm, Frank 
Richards. We have many of his pictures, mostly impression- 
ist water-colours, which prove the heights to which Richards 
could have risen if he had continued to have the leisure to 
which he was born. He might have done very well in black- 
and-white too. He could have come nearer to Phil May than 
most people, for he too had caught the spirit of Japan in 
the simplicity and bold curves of his drawing; and he had 
considerable humour. His limpidity and the charm of his 
colouring were especially shown in his paintings of Venice. 

His portrait of Dudley Hardy is simply admirable, for 
Dudley, with his whimsical smile and jaunty way of wearing 
his hat, looks like a Parisian notable. 

For some years we saw more of Reginald Cleaver than any 
other artist. Cleaver was at that time the favourite artist 
of the Graphic, as well as a regular contributor to Punch. 
He was excellent in catching likenesses, and his crisp and 
beautiful handiwork made his pictures of passing events most 
attractive. The Graphic always sent him to the most impor- 
tant functions, such as royal weddings. He hated this work, 
because he was far too gentlemanly and too shy to push, 
and the people in charge of royal functions seemed to take 
a pleasure in putting every disadvantage they could in the 
way of the artists and journalists who had to immortalise 
the occasion for their fellow-countrymen. The artist was 



356 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

expected to stand behind the organ or anywhere else provided 
he was sufficiently out of sight; whether he could see or not 
was of very little consideration. But one day Fate overtook 
the autocrat who used to browbeat the Press. It was in 
the days when the late King was Prince of Wales, and his 
brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, had just become a German 
reigning prince as Prince of Saxo Coburg Gotha. Cleaver, 
who was posted where he could not see the procession as it 
entered, imagined that the Duchess of Edinburgh as a reigning 
princess would take precedence of the Princess of Wales, 
and gave her precedence in his picture in the Daily Graphic. 
Before ten o'clock the next morning a messenger from Marl- 
borough House arrived at the Graphic office to know the mean- 
ing of this libel, and the editor explained that the artist had 
been placed in a position where he could not see the Princess. 
The Princess was furious. She attached no blame to the 
artist, but she sent for the autocrat and gave him to under- 
stand that there must be no more accidents of this kind, 
and from that day forward there was a great change in the 
way in which artists were treated at royal functions. 

We spent several of our summer holidays together. 
Cleaver's sketches of famous people at historical functions 
will have a permanent value. He had no rival in fidelity and 
charm in this kind of work. In recent years the world has 
seen too little of his work owing to his being so much abroad. 
He is the elder brother of Ralph Cleaver, the well-known 
political caricaturist. 

Holland Tringham, a very good-looking and well-bred 
man, of whom I saw a good deal at that time, had a battle 
royal with a millionaire duchess over a similar question. He 
went down to represent one of the chief illustrated papers at 
a great ball she was giving at her country house. When he 
got there, he was received with scant ceremony, but began his 
work. When supper-time came, the housekeeper arrived to 
tell him that he would find his supper in the still room. He 
showed her the beginnings of his sketch — and he was a brilliant 
artist — and said, " Take this to her Grace and tell her that 
if she does not come and fetch me to supper with her guests, 
I shall tear it up, and go home." 



MY ARTIST FRIENDS 357 

Her Grace came, took him to supper, and introduced him 
to her friends galore, and the picture appeared. Of course, 
Tringham was very sure of his position as an artist with the 
paper, or he would not have risked the chance of being sacri- 
ficed on the altar of the offended duchess. I should like to 
have heard what the housekeeper told her. 

There has not been so much of this snobbery lately among 
hostesses ; the race for publicity having become too acute. 

I must have met Sambourne, who succeeded Sir John 
Tenniel as chief artist of Punch, when I was a boy, for he 
married a Miss Herapath, and when we were children she 
and her brothers were generally having tea at our house in 
Upper Phillimore Gardens if we were not having tea at theirs 
a few yards away. I never lost sight of him, and in the last 
years of his life saw more rather than less of Sambourne, 
whose thoroughness was always a marvel to me. No pains 
were too great for him to be accurate in the details of his 
cartoons and whimsicalities. I forget how many thousand 
photographs he told me he had, which he could use like a 
dictionary. But I remember that his idea of the best day's 
holiday one could take was to go to Boulogne in the morning 
on a day when there was a good sea on, lunch there, and come 
back in the afternoon. 

His successor on Punch, Bernard Partridge, was very often 
at Addison Mansions in the old Idler and Vagabond days. 
He had already achieved fame in two directions — as a black- 
and-white artist whose handiwork was unexcelled for delicate 
beauty and romantic charm, and as an actor. But he did 
not act under his own name; he was Bernard Gould behind 
the footlights. Partridge's father, the late Prof. Richard 
Partridge, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the 
greatest surgeons of his day. Mrs. Partridge, then Miss 
Harvey, was also often at our at-homes. 

Another Punch and Graphic artist often with us was 
Alexander Stuart Boyd, whose wife, Mary Stuart Boyd, is a 
favourite novelist of the great house of Blackwood. Boyd 
has the dry wit of his race, so it is not surprising that such a 
fine artist should have found his way to Punch. He now 
gives his time to painting and spends much of his time at a 



358 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

house he has in the Balearic Islands. He was a very old 
Vagabond. I met him there or at the Idler teas. 

There, too, I met Hal Hurst, my neighbour and constant 
associate for years, though we do not often meet now. I 
have various pictures of his in my present house. Hurst, 
who was a very clever artist, and his friend Alyn Williams, 
the president of one of the two Miniature Painters' Societies, 
not only shared a studio in Mayfair, but married beautiful 
young wives about the same time, who were constantly 
together, one very dark and the other very fair. Mrs. 
Williams was the picture of health, but suddenly she was struck 
down by a mysterious malady, and almost wasted to death, 
a terrible shock to all who had seen much of them. Then, 
for no apparently sufficient reason, she suddenly picked up 
again, threw off her malady completely, and was restored 
to her old radiant health ; it was like coming back from 
the grave. The Royal Family have been great patrons of 
Williams' miniatures. 

Oddly enough, I knew the president of the other society 
of miniature painters equally well — Alfred Praga, an Italian 
by extraction, a well-known and popular member of the 
Savage Club. Praga lives in a picturesque grey house off 
Hornton Street. His wife is a well-known writer. 

With them it is natural to mention the brilliant Robert 
Sauber, a German by extraction, who for years was one of 
the most popular artists in journalism ; whatever paper or 
magazine you took up, it was almost sure to have a cover 
with a charming female figure designed by Sauber. I have 
a delightful specimen painted for the menu of the Vagabond 
Club on some important occasion. But Sauber was not 
only a journalistic artist ; he has been painting large decora- 
tive panels and ceilings and portraits for the last thirteen 
years, and has done no illustrations for the last twelve years. 
He is an exhibitor at the principal Salons in London, Paris 
and Munich. 

While mentioning Punch artists, I forgot two who were 
constant visitors at Addison Mansions — John Hassall and 
Chantrey Corbould. 

The man who helped to keep our at-homes going more than 



MY ARTIST FRIENDS 359 

any one else was Chantrey Corbould, the artist, a godson of 
the great Sir Francis Chantrey, whose bequest is almost as 
famous as his sculpture; he was a nephew also of Charles 
Keene, the immortal Punch artist and etcher, on the mother's 
side. Edward H. Corbould, his father's eldest brother, taught 
the Royal Family. 

Corbould was a huge man, with a very jovial, high- 
coloured, handsome face, and a very horsey appearance, 
as becomes one of the best hunting-picture artists who ever 
drew for Punch. He had a very loud and hearty laugh, which 
could be heard all over the house, and told good stories, 
and always had a court of the ladies of Bohemia round him 
in the inner room. He had one golden quality; whenever 
he saw a woman sitting neglected, he went over and fetched 
her to join his circle, and the older and uglier she was, the 
more particular he was to do it. 

I was wrong in saying that we never had an entertainment 
at our at-homes — Corbould's stories were an entertainment, 
but people had not to keep silent with them ; the more noise 
they made, the better he liked it. He was very funny some- 
times. 

When I asked Corbould what first turned his attention to 
Art, he said— 

" I was always for the Arts. Charles S. Keene, my 
mother's brother, took me in hand, saying ' sketch from 
Nature,' so I am altogether self-taught. I never went to 
any Art school. Keene 's idea was that I should eventually 
step into a ' staff appointment on Punch. ' I began under 
Shirley Brooks, then Tom Taylor, and later under F. C. 
Bumand. Tom Taylor promised me the first vacancy at 
' The Punch Table,' but he died, and F. C. Bumand took on 
Furniss. I began with Punch in the early 'seventies ; later 
I worked for the Graphic, the Illustrated London News, the 
Daily Graphic (1890), etc. I have always loved ' gee-gees.' " 

John Hassall is a universally popular man, and certainly one 
of the most capable artists of the day. One cannot be sure 
to what heights he will rise. He was not much more than a 
boy when he first came to our house, and he was not much 
more than a boy when he first got into Punch. As he is a 



360 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE 

brilliant caricaturist, with a strong political sense, he could 
be the Conservative F.C.G. whenever he chooses. Probably 
he would dislike the drudgery of producing constant political 
cartoons — all work done against time. G. R. H., the famous 
cartoonist of the Pall Mall Gazette, found the work too ex- 
acting, and Hassall, the most popular poster designer of the 
day, has many irons in the fire which require attending to. 
But he is a born caricaturist of the unexaggerating kind 
which the future will demand. 

Joseph Pennell, the artist, and his charming wife, one of 
the best travel -writers in America, have been friends of ours 
for many years. They live in an old house in Buckingham 
Street, Strand, near the gate, which now does nothing on 
the Thames Embankment but is, I suppose, the last of the 
water-gates of the Thames. Pennell confered one of the 
great pleasures of our lives on us by making us go to Le Puy, 
at the source of the Loire, which he had been drawing for 
some periodical. The statues of saints and tiny chapels 
standing up on needle rocks against the sky, which look so 
fascinating in his sketches, are not a whit less fantastic in 
real life, and, until quite lately, you could see from the plain 
High Mass being celebrated in the cathedral, which was at 
the western end of the rock. The great west doors were flung 
open for the purpose, until the mortality among the priests 
became too great. At Le Puy the old market-women wear 
their hats over their caps, and frogs are as cheap as dirt — real 
edible frogs. 

I went to a banquet given by the town to its most famous 
son, M. Dupuy, who was then Prime Minister of France, 
and was, as it happened, a native, though he did spell the 
Puy in his name with a small p. We paid three francs a head 
— less than half-a-crown — for the banquet, including wine, 
and an introduction to the Premier. 



INDEX 

of the leading people about whom Personal Reminiscences or 
New Facts are related. 



Adcock, St. John, 200 
Ainslie, Douglas, 114 
Alamayu, Prince, 256-257 
Albanesi, Madame, 133 
Alden, H. M., 48 
Alden, W. L., 102 
Alexander, Boyd, 226 
Alexander, Sir George, 277, 278 
Alexander, Mrs. (Mrs. Hector), 119 
Allen, Grant, 258-259 
Allhusen, Mrs. Henry, 126 
Angell, Norman, 171 
Argonauts' Club, The, 179-180 
Arnim, Countess von, 244 
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 116-117 
Ashwell, Lena, 331-332, 345 
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin, 131-132 
Austin, Alfred, 263 
Authors' Club, The, 146-161 
Ayrton, Edward, 319 

Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J., 153, 168, 235 

Barker, Granville, 339 

Barlass, Douglas, 111 

Barr, Robert, 101-102, 162-163 

Barrie, Sir J. M., 77, 157, 158 

Bashford, Lindsay, 199-200 

Bate, Francis, 348 

Battye, Aubyn Trevor-, 320-321 

Baumann, A. A., 194 

Beardsley, Aubrey, 352 

Becke, Louis, 242 

Beerbohm, Max, 302-303 

Belloc-Lowndes, Marie, 135 

Beresford, Lord Charles, 171 

Bernhardt, Sarah, 167-169, 341 

Besant, Annie, 251 

Besant, Sir Walter, 68, 147-150, 182, 

251 
Bigelow, Poulteney, 155 
Bird, Isabella, 317 
Boldrewood, Rolf, 241-242 
Bond, Acton Acton, 339-340 



Boos6, J. R., 250 

Boothby, Guy, 242 

Bourchier, Arthur, 338-339 

Bourget, Paul, 66 

Bourne, Cardinal, 218-219 

Boyd, A. K. H., 307-308 

Boyd, A. S., 357-358 

Brackenbury, Sir Henry, 303 

" Braddon, Miss," 119 

Bradley, Dean, 128 

Brandes, Georg, 6 

Brinsmead, John, 4 

Brodhurst, J. Penderel, 119 

Bullen, Frank, 242, 288-289 

Bulloch, J. M., 198-199 

Bunning, Herbert, 66 

Burgin, G. B., 162, 164-165, 166, 176 

Burnett, Mrs. Frances Hodgson, 130 

Burroughs, John, 260, 270 

Burton, Sir Richard, 10 

Cable, G. W., 260 
Caine, Hall, 113, 157, 253-254 
Callaghan, Admiral Sir G., 210-211 
Calthrop, Dion Clayton, 289 
Campbell, Frances, 243 
Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 278, 345 
Cardigan, Lady, 141-142 
Carman, Bliss, 111-112 
Castle, Egerton, 267 
Cave, George, K.C., M.P., 130, 191 
Cawston, George, 169 
Chambers, Haddon, 244 
Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston, 175 
Clarke, Lewis, 327 
Cleaver, Reginald, 355-356 
" Cleeve, Lucas," 138 
Cleveland, President, 30, 50 
Clifford, Mrs. W. K., 127-128 
Coffin, C. Hayden, 329-330 
Coke, Desmond, 289-290 
Cook, Theodore Andrea, 195 
Cooper, E. H., 290-291 



361 



362 



INDEX 



Corbould, A. Chantrey, 353, 354, 

358-359 
Corelli, Marie, 25, 126 
Cornish, Herbert, 202 
Coronation, The, 200 
Couch, Sir A. T, Quiller-, 283-284 
Courtney, W. L., 194-195 
Crane, Walter, R.I., 349-350 
Craven, Miss Maude Chester, 140- 

142 
Crawfurd, Oswald, 148 
Creighton, Bishop, of London, 153, 

170-171 
Crockett, S. R., 255 
Croker, Mrs. B. M., 120-121 

" Danby, Frank," 135 

Darnley, Countess of, 245 

Davidson, John, 107 

De I'Hopital, R6n6, 350-351 

De Lorey, Eustache, 67, 218, 226 

De Morgan, William, 266-267 

Denison, George Taylor, 32 

Derby, late Earl, 310-311 

Devonshire Club, 187 

Dickens, Charles, 1 

Dilettante Club, The, 62 

Dilke, Sir Charles, M.P., 308-309 

Dillon, Dr., 302 

Di6sy, Arthur, 177 

Dobson, Austin, 104 

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 73-77, 

156-157, 176 
Duiferin, late Marquis of, 310 
Dundonald, Earl of, 81, 169, 170 
Dunn, James Nicol, 197 

Edward, H.M. King, 181, 187, 309, 

341 
Egerton, George, 134-135 
Eliot, George, 251 
Escoffier, M., 198 

Fagan, J. Bernard, 278 
Farnol, Jefiery, 291-292 
Fawcett, Edgar, 112 
Fenn, Fred, 258 
Fenn, G. M., 257 
Field, Eugene, 54 
Fletcher, Benton, 223 
Forbes-Robertson, Sir J., 90, 334- 

336 
Ford, I. N., 321-322 
Fowler, Ellen Thomeycroft, 129, 164 
France, Anatole, 67 



Eraser, John Foster, 319-320 
Frederic, Harold, 264-265 
Freeman, Rev. H. B., 194 
Fry, C. B., 172 

Garvice, Charles, 280-283 

George V., H.M. The King, 41 

Gilbert, W. S., 237 

Gissing, George, 269 

Glazebrook, Hugh de Trafford, 351 

Glazebrook, Canon M. G., 351 

Gore, Right Rev.C, Bishop of Oxford, 

10, 11, 153, 192 
Gorst, Mrs. Harold, 138 
Gorst, Sir John, 138 
Gosse, Edmund, 26, 103 
Grace, W. G., 198 
"Grand, Sarah," 124 
"Gray, Maxwell," 119 
Gribble, Francis, 292-293 
Grossmith, George, 176-177, 328- 

329 
Grossmith, Weedon, 328, 338 

Haggard, Sir H. Rider, 284-285 
Hamilton, General Sir Ian, 154, 

169 
Hardy, Dudley, 355 
Hardy, Thomas, 117, 208, 253 
Harland, Henry, 288 
Harraden, Beatrice, 129-130 
Harris, Sir Augustus, 149 
Harte, Bret, 94-95 
Harvey, Martin, 337 
Hassall, J., 358, 359-360 
Hatton, Joseph, 254-255 
Hay, Colonel John, 30, 50, 150, 

321-322 
Hearn, Lafcadio, 68 
Hedgcock, Walter, 185 
Helmsley, C. T. H., 278 
Henley, W. E., 26, 117-118 
Henniker-Heaton, Sir J., 263 
Hentschel, Carl, 86-87, 176 
Henty, G. A., 256 
Hichens, Robert, 277-278 
Hicks, Seymour, 183 
Hind, Lewis, 188-189 
Hird, Frank, 293 
"Hobbes, John Oliver," 131, 175 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 27, 96, 

145, 252 
" Hope, Anthony " (A. H. Hawkins), 

78-79, 175-176, 180 
Houghton, H. 0., 27 



INDEX 



363 



Howells, W. D., 259 
Humphris, Edith M., 324-325 
Hunt, Violet, 135-136 
Hurst, Hal, 358 

Ingram, Rt. Rev. A. F. Winnington-, 

Bishop of London, 163 
" Iota " (Mrs. Mannington Caffjm), 

243 
Irving, Sir Henry, 167, 344 

Jackson, Frederick, 321 

Jacobs, W. W,, 98-99 

James, Henry, 261-262 

Jefferies, Richard, 258 

Jepson, Edgar, 293-294 

Jerome, Jerome K., 65, 82-91, 96, 

158, 162-163, 167, 188, 334 
Jerrold, Walter, 195-196 
Jeyes, S. H., 25, 191-194 
Jones, Henry Arthur, 154, 209, 336- 

337, 347 
Jowett. Rev. Benjamin, Master of 

Balliol, 10. 338 

Kenealy, Alexander, 201 
Kenealy, Arabella, 201 
Kernahan, Coulson, 165-166, 270-271 
Key, K. J., 295 
"Kingston, Gertrude," 342 
Kipling, Rudyard, 77 
Knight, Joseph, 334 
Knoblauch, Edward, 287 

Lamb, Captain Thomas, 298-299 
Lambs, The, 297, 298-299 
Lambton (Meux), Admiral Sir Hed- 

worth, 171 
Landor, A. H. Savage, 30, 37, 314- 

316, 322 
Lane, John, 134. 269, 352 
Lang, Andrew, 104, 308 
Larisch, Countess Marie, 141 
Lawrence, Sir Walter, Bart.,G.C.I.E., 

8 
I^ Gallienne, R., 108, 259 
Lehmann, Rudolf, 94 
Leighton, Marie Connor, 137, 275- 

276 
Leighton, Robert, 275-276 
Le Queux, William, 294 
Lewin, P. Evans, 250 
Lindsay, Lady, 114, 124-125 
Linton, Mrs. Lynn, 119-120 
Locke, W. J., 269 



Longfellow, Miss Alice, 27 
Lorimer, Norma, 139-140, 212-213, 

215, 327 
Lovatelli, Countess, 293 
Low, Sidney, 191 

"Maartens, Maarten," 66 

McCarthy, Justin, M.P., 108 

McCarthy, Justin Huntly, 108 

Mackay, Charles, 35 

Mackellar, C. D., 323-324 

Mackenzie, Compton, 296-297 

" Maclaren, Ian," 161 

Maclaughlan, Hugh, 238 

"Malet, Lucas," 129 

Markino, Yoshio, 69-72, 226-227, 228 

Marriott, Charles, 295 

Marryat, Florence, 137 

Marston, R. B., 199 

Martin, A. Patchett, 183, 249, 250 

Martin, Robert Jasper, 151-154 

Mason, A. E. W., 273-274 

"Mathers, Helen," 130 

Maude, Cyril, 344 

Maugham, W. Somerset, 286-287 

Maxwell, Gen. Sir J. G., 318 

Maxwell, W. B., 279 

May, Phil, 92, 352-355 

Meredith, George, 181, 252 

Miles, Eustace, 172 

Millais, Sir J. E., P.R.A., 7 

Mitford, Bertram, 294-295 

Monkswell, Lord, 297 

Montr6sor, Miss, 136-137 

Moore, T. Frankfort, 79-80, 166 

Mordaunt, Elinor, 245-246 

Morris, Sir Lewis, 103 

Morrison, Arthur, 276 

Morrison, Dr. G. E., 15, 246-248, 

312 
Moulton, Louise Chandler, 26, 52 
Murray, David, 348 
Myers, F. W. H., 104-106 

Nansen, Frithjof, 187, 320-321 

" Neilson, Julia," 329, 330, 345 

Neish, Mrs. Charles, 306 

Nethersole, Olga, 337 

Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 125 

Newman, Cardinal, 8-9, 219 

Nicholson, William, 348 

Nicoll, Sir W. Robertson, 197, 282 

Nimr, Dr., 224 

Norman, Sir Henry, M.P., 247 

Nye, Bill, 154, 177 



364 



INDEX 



O'Connor, T. P., 168, 198 
Odell, J. S., 186 
Ohrwalder, Father, 317-318 
Oliver, Edwin, 201 
O'Rell, Max, 100-101 
Osgood, Irene, 131 

Pain, Barry, 102 
Pankhurst, Christabel, 172, 173 
Parke, Ernest, 200 
Parker, Sir Gilbert, 262 
Parker, Louis Napoleon, 287 
Partridge, Bernard, 357 
Paternoster, G. Sidney, 62, 200 
Pemberton, Max, 274-275 
Pennell, Joseph, 360 
Percival, Bishop of Hereford, 23 
Perrin, Mrs. Charles, 121-123 
Phillpotts, Eden, 276-277 
Praed, Mrs. Campbell, 241 
Prowse, R. O., 297 

Raper, R. W., 10, 192-193 

Ratti, Henry, 240 

Reid, Rt. Hon. Sir George, 178-179 

Reid, Sir H. Gilzean, 201-202 

Reid, Whitelaw, 322 

Renshaws, The, 297-298 

Richards, J. M., 322-323 

Ridge, W. Pett, 98, 172 

" Rita," 244 

Rives, Amelie, 131 

Roberts, Field-Marshal Earl, V.C, 

120, 167, 169 
Roberts, Morley, 285-286 
Robertson, Rt. Rev. A., Bishop of 

Exeter, 10 
Robertson, Sir George Scott, M.P., 

177-178 
Robertson, Mrs. Ian, 334 
Robins, Elizabeth, 341-342 
Robinson, F. W., 255-256 
Robinson, Fletcher, 275 
Rockman, Ray, 340-341 
Rolfe, Eustace Neville, 207 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 224 
Rose, Algernon, 159-160 
Rosebery, Lord, 235 
"Ross, Adrian," 113-114 
Rowe, Mrs. Jopling, 64, 347 
Rusden, G. W., 248-249 

St. Helier, Lady, 125, 293 
Salisbury, late Marquess of, 264 
Samboume, Linley, 357 



Sarruf, Dr., 224 

Sauber, Robert, 358 

Savage Club, 181-187 

Saxony, Ex-Crown Princess of, 141, 

142 
Schmalz, Herbert, 347 
Scott, Capt., R.N., 173 
Seaman, Sir Owen, 200 
Seddon, Rt. Hon. J. R., 171 
Selous, F. C, 313-314 
Seton, Sir Bruce, 26 
Seton,ErnestThompson,173-174,302 
Seymour, Admiral Sir Edward, 151 
Seymour, Admiral Sir Michael Culme, 

34 
Shannon, J. J., R.A., 348 
Sharp, William, 25, 112, 113 
Shaw, Bernard, 65, 237 
Shaylor, Joseph, 301-302 
Sherman, Gen. W. Tecumseh, 30 
Shorter, Clement, 196-197 
Shorter, Dora Sigerson, 115-116 
Sickert, B., 92-93 
Sidgwick, Henry, 105-106 
Sidgwick, Mrs. A., 136 
Sidney, F. E., 80 
Sinclair, Archdeacon, 155, 156, 304- 

305 
Sladen, Arthur, C.M.G., 6 
Sladen, Sir Charles, K.C.M.G., 14 
Sladen, Douglas Brooke (my father), 1 
Sladen, Col. Sir Edward, 120 
Sladen, Gen. John, 120 
Sladen, John Baker, D.L., J.P., 1 
Sladen, Lieut. Sampson, R.N., 6, 69 
Smith, Frank Hopkinson, 265-266 
Smith, Goldwin, 32 
Solomon, Solomon J., R.A., 347 
Southesk, the late Earl of, 233 
Spender, Harold, 200 
Spender, J. A., 200 
Spielmann, M. H., 306 
Stanley, Lady (Dorothy), 316-317 
Stanley, Sir H. M., 105, 316 
Stanton, Father, 10, 80-81, 170-171 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 27, 52, 96 
Steel, Mrs. Flora Annie, 123, 175 
Steevens, G. W., 318 
Stepniak, Sergius, 67, 154 
" Stevens, Miss E. S.," 143-145 
Stockdale versus Hansard, 1 
Stockton, Frank, 97-98, 154 
Stoker, Bram, 80 
Strindberg, August, 67 
Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford, 12 



INDEX 



365 



"Swan, Annie S.," 137 
" Swift, Benjamin," 285 

Taylor, J. H., 72 
Tedder, H. R., 158 
Tennyson, 309 
Terry, Fred, 329 
"Thirlmere, Rowland," 114 
Thomas, Brandon, 183 
Thomas, Margaret, 249 
Thomson, Basil, 325 
Thring, G. Herbert, 158-160 
Thurston, Katherine Cecil, 136 
Tree, Sir H. Beerbohm, 344 
Trench, Herbert, 110 
Tringham, Holland, 356-357 
Turner, Henry Gyles, 248, 249 
" Twain, Mark," 53, 95-97, 303 
Tynan, Katherine, 116 

Vachell, H. A., 271-273 

Vagabonds' Club, The, 162-182 
Van Home, Sir William, 31 
Victoria, H.M. Queen, 189-190 
Villiers, Fred, 326 
Visetti, Albert, 115 

Ward, Sir Edward, K.C.B., 178 
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 126-127, 241 
Ward, John, F.S.A., 318 
Watson, A. E. T., 202-203 
Watson, H. B. Marriott, 279-280 
Watson, R. Seton-, 323 
Watson, William, 106 
Watt, A. P., 204 
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 113 
Webbe, A. J., 191-192 
Webster, Ben, 330-331 
Weigall, A. E. P., 318-319 
Welch, James, 107, 332-333 



Wells, H. G., 99-100 
Weyman, Stanley, 255 
Wheelton, Mr. John, Sheriff, 1 
Wheel ton, Mary (my mother), 4, 5, 6 
Whistler, J. MaoNeill, 64 
Whitaker, G. H., 199 
White, Gleeson, 112 
White, Herbert K., 197 
White, Percy, 267-268 
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 27 
Wilberforce, Archdeacon, 305-306 
Wilde, Oscar, 64, 108-111 
Wilkins, Mary E., 145 
Wilkins, W. H., 300-301 
Williamson, Alice (Mrs. G. N.), 132- 

133, 163 
Williamson, C. N., 132-133 
Williamson, Dr. G. C, 304 
Willoughby de Broke, Lord, 174-175 
Wills, C. J., 320 
Wingate, Sir Reginald, 317, 318 
" Winter, John Strange," 133-134 
Wolf, Lucien, 154-155 
Wolseley, Field-Marshal Viscount, 

151-152 
Wood, Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn, 

V.C, 154 
Wood, J. S., 201 
Woods, Rev. H. G., Master of the 

Temple, 11 
Woods, Margaret, 128-129 
Worsfold, Dr. Cato, 159 
Wright, Huntley, 330 
Wyndham, Sir Charles, 343-344 
Wynfield, David Wilkie, 346 

Yeats, W. B., 106-107 

Zangwill, Israel, 88, 91-94 
Zola, Emile, 67, 154 






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